Mr. Andrew Munro:

Exactly, we can set the standards. Where the real challenge arises is that we can have all these standards in Irish law that state a surrogate mother in a foreign jurisdiction must have support or healthcare, for example, but how do we establish that it happened? Without an adequacy agreement or an international framework in place, the challenge is who is going to establish that and how they can prove it. There are ways of doing those things. They are just very challenging when one does not have regulatory supervision in another country. The fact that commercial surrogacy is done in so few countries shows the challenge that exists. Our domestic legislation sees the challenge with all of that.

It is not impossible, as I said earlier. It is identifying the fundamental principles we wish to protect and starting there. It is saying how we reach in and if we cannot reach in, what we can do when people get here to ensure that all these rights and principles were respected. We end up with different legislation. It is not about saying that the foreign authority will ensure this, but about what we can do from here. That is exceptionally challenging, although not impossible. I am sorry to say that it is the committee's job. That is why we gave it the issues paper. The challenge the committee has is to try to explore that and see if there is something out there. We do not see an easy pathway to that. That is why we raised the challenges in the issues paper.