Professor Conor O'Mahony:

I thank the Chair. My answer to this question will probably double up neatly on what I would have said in my closing statement in any event, which is that I do not like to think of this so much in respect of a sequencing of priorities because the risk with that is that we end up doing things in a piecemeal way. This is the opportunity that we have been waiting on for too long in order to address this in a holistic way and to do everything, not just to do some of it. It has taken us years to get to this point. Deputy Bacik made the point earlier on that she was on a committee many years ago at this stage, 15 years ago, looking at this issue and it failed to get it done.

The Children and Family Relationships Act 2015 failed to get everything done. We had a Supreme Court decision in 2014 in which the Attorney General made a commitment to the Supreme Court at that time that the Oireachtas was planning on legislating to address these issues. That has still not happened. My real sense of all of this is if not now, when? Anything that gets left out now could stay left out for an awfully long time. The real message I want to leave the committee with is that we cannot afford to decide that certain things are for now and certain things are for later because later could be a considerable time later and all one is doing then is replicating the same problems that we have been storing up to now. As this is a chance to do everything, we need to have a holistic Bill that covers all of the angles.