Professor Conor O'Mahony:

There is an inherent difficulty given the nature of surrogacy that where laws are not complied with, we do end up with a very difficult choice between, on the one hand, approving an arrangement where perhaps the surrogate mother did not fully consent or there was some violation of the law of the country in which it took place or if we create that lacuna. It is not an ideal scenario.

That is why a big part of the report was that to seek to avoid some of these issues arising, we would prefer to incentivise people to engage in domestic surrogacy as far as possible. We can regulate what happens in domestic surrogacy arrangements more effectively and have the advance approval I mentioned, which is difficult to have in the context of international surrogacy because we cannot grant or withhold approval of what happens in another jurisdiction. If we arrange our laws in such a way that domestic surrogacy is a more streamlined and preferable process for intending parents in order that as many of them as possible stay in the jurisdiction and avoid international surrogacy, then we can try to catch some of these issues before they happen.

How do we do that? We do it by making the process more attractive to intending parents in this jurisdiction. The pre-birth transfer of parentage was the mechanism that my report recommended for that purpose. That would be a more attractive model to intending parents than the post-birth transfer and would incentivise more Irish intending parents to stay here under a higher level of domestic supervision, rather than travelling abroad where there are more variables and things we cannot control. That was how the report proposed to mitigate those risks as far as possible but we can only mitigate these risks, not fully eliminate them.