Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----and could be prescribed for.

I just want to come back to the funding. Dr. Wingfield raised legitimate points of who gets funding that are very important for consideration. Certainly, in the surrogacy sphere, there are people pretty much mortgaging their futures, pensions and their possibility of buying houses. There is a misunderstanding that people who engage in surrogacy are somehow well off, better off or are buying their way through. However, they are often people who are sacrificing their future. Therefore, how we fund or support that would be a question for another day. In the context of IVF, certainly we need to address the funding in that regard and Dr. Wingfield stated that very well.

On the counselling, I agree that it is an ongoing matter. A poem that sits in our house reads "You were not born under my heart, but in it”. It tries to encapsulate that concept that you were born in my heart, but I did not give birth to you. That conversation develops as we move forward. It is important that it is ongoing and not something that is seen as pre-birth, but actually ongoing and that support is there. That can be there if we have a recognised surrogacy in place. We will then have practitioners who can specialise in it also. Is that not the case?

Those are my questions, because we have been very thorough. That is where I am at for now. Someone else may want to come in.