Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Deputy O'Connell picked up on some of what I said about research. It is important that we take a very honest look at whatever the research shows. That is the principle that must always guide us. We have to be conscious of issues of objectivity and test for it, understand what research is capable of showing us and its limitations because research does not always cover all of reality. We need to know that. It is an imperfect world. My point was that there are things research cannot answer. This raises a separate question as to whether there are breaches of rights involved here? A person may be upset because his or her rights have been breached. It may not be demonstrable that he or she has suffered harm but that does not mean that we should allow his or her rights to be breached. That is why my question to Dr. Madden on whether she thinks surrogacy should be discouraged was important. Is there something wrong at the heart of it that should be acknowledged? Her answer to that question will determine an awful lot more of what she thinks about whether this area should be regulated in a way that permits surrogacy.We can also talk about regulation that actually bans surrogacy. I made the point that I understand Sweden is moving in another direction which suggests that it knows something. We often cite the Nordic countries as being very enlightened. This is far from settled territory. There are some very serious considerations to be reflected on.

To move away from surrogacy, as I said I would, an article in the Law Society Ireland Gazette, in discussing this scheme, referred to us sleepwalking into the possibility of large-scale human tragedy and emotional devastation as the Government legislates for birth certificate legal fictions in cases of assisted human reproduction. I am in the hands of the experts here but do I understand that it is proposed that birth certificates will effectively be falsified to hide assisted human reproduction realities in that it will not be knowable from the birth certificate whether parents are natural genetic parents or donor parents? I ask this in a neutral way but it seems that the answer to that question would raise many other questions.

In everything we do, we proceed on the basis of fact and truth. This is related to the issue of whether people should be encouraged or required to be open with their children. If we are talking about birth certificates in any way occluding reality, we have to be honest and say that while this process is intended to help some adults, it involves children either being confronted with very complicated realities, such as a birth certificate that refers to genetic parents, legal parents and birth mother, or being lied to by omission, by not being told something which they might have an interest in knowing. I would be grateful for some clarification on what exactly is proposed in all of this but it seems to me on first principles that anything that hides or obscures should be considered a problem. My thinking has evolved on this. I hate the idea of children being confronted with complicated realities. However, maybe we need to reflect on the complicated realities we are proposing to legalise and regulate because it seems there is no way of knowing what a child has an interest in knowing and when.

The parents may have a particular view, but if it deviates from what the truth actually is, there are many problematic issues. Do people consider that it ought not to be a matter of telling their child what they think he or she needs to know when they think he or she needs to know it? If this process is to be legally permitted, it implies a certain conferral of social approval on it. That process may need to require that information is shared, by all means in an appropriate way, but that anything else is engaging in an untruthfulness that snowballs over time. Having the aspiration that parents would be open with their children, as Professor Hayes mentioned, is a long way from securing children's rights in this area. I am open to correction on the facts or a different opinion being offered.

In all this, people constantly talk about the well-being of the child. Concern for the child's welfare always seems to be fundamentally predicated on adults getting what they want and that needs to be interrogated.

I refer to the requirement on donors to keep the register updated with relevant information, for example, if they are diagnosed with health conditions. Is it respecting a child's right that the donor would be the one with this responsibility? Is it possible that that would be more honoured in the breach than in the observance? If we are to regulate this area of activity, the requirement ought to be on the providers of the service to maintain contact with donors and secure that information. Those providers who make money out of this process should be responsible to the children, either in the present or the future, for gathering such information. I wonder about the mentality behind this. I do not think there is any reality to placing the onus on donors. I think it is a joke.