Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

A British judge ruled this week that a couple are legal parents of their adult son under English law. RTÉ reported:

The judge said the couple's son was born in the US in 1998 after they made a surrogacy arrangement there.

The couple visited the surrogate mother in the US during her pregnancy, the judge said, and returned to the UK when their son was a few days old.

The judge said the couple had been their son's legal parents under US law, but not under English law.

That ruling was made this week. I ask Dr. Mulligan to outline her opinion on that.

The difficulty in that case was a timeframe problem. The couple did not regularise their son's status early enough. There have been a lot of problems with that in the UK, where there was originally a six-month time limit for recognition. That was a problem, because if people did not get organised in six months, they could not get a parental order. The UK courts actually bent the language of the law so much that they almost disapplied it. I have noticed that the draft legislation here actually allows for an extension of that time, which is a very clever rule, in my view, because it foresees the problem that the English courts had. The difficulty in the case to which the Deputy referred was that the time had elapsed. In that case, the child was an adult as well. That is a feature of these cases. One cannot make orders for adults. For example, an adult cannot be adopted under Irish law. Once the child gets to 18, that is it - an adoption order cannot be made. Similarly, a parental order cannot be made, because as a matter of law, the person does not have parents in the sense that children have parents.

The Deputy's final question was about compensation. The question of how to fairly compensate the surrogate is a really interesting one. While we might not like the idea of commercial surrogacy, if someone is being a surrogate, we probably think they should be compensated in some way. I note that the draft legislation has actually relaxed the rules on this. Originally, in the general scheme, the legislation restricted payment of reasonable expenses, so that the only significant sum that could be accrued was the cost of two or three months out of work, whereas the current legislation essentially allows for the payment of six months' loss of earnings around the time of the birth. I think that is quite reasonable, whereas two or three months is not a lot of time. I do not have a huge difficulty with it, personally. As I have said, these are personal ethical judgments. Someone like me can give the members a steer on what I think, but ultimately, it is for them to make their judgment on that. I think the regime is quite good in terms of what is in the AHR Bill as it is.