Professor Conor O'Mahony:

Just to elaborate a little bit on what I said earlier in that respect, I am very conscious this is an issue that does not just go back to 2017. If we go back to 2014, when there was a Supreme Court decision on this point, counsel for the Attorney General went into the Supreme Court in that case and essentially said to the courts we do not want the courts intervening and making radical decisions on surrogacy because the Oireachtas is working on this and there are proposals in development. That was 2014. Originally, the proposal was to have that in place before the marriage referendum in 2015. That was then carved off the 2015 Act because it was deemed to be too complicated to get it finished in the time that was then available. We then had another Bill in 2017. We have another one this year. This is something has been a long time in development. It has taken us an awfully long time to reach this point. My fear is that anything that does not make it in now may take just as long to come back around for another pass at it, if not longer. It could be potentially even longer because we would be looking not at a complete gap but at a partial gap. Therefore, getting it the level of political priority and the space on the programme of legislation may prove to be very challenging. If this is omitted now, it would be a huge opportunity missed and one that is likely to have quite adverse consequences for the people affected.