Dr. Andrea Mulligan:

It is an interesting question. It is wonderful that there will be a regulatory agency. A huge problem in this area is that there is no regulator, which means there is no regulation or information. We live in a vacuum where we have no way to even know what is going on in Ireland, never mind what is going on with Irish people going abroad.

The purview of the regulator will be primarily domestic. It could have a role in establishing parentage arising from international surrogacy. The idea is that it will operate like a surrogacy register, where people are able to vindicate their identity rights by finding details of their surrogate.

In international surrogacy, ideally, people would be able to register details of foreign surrogates with the agency as well and it would make sense if there was a register of foreign surrogacies as well. The agency would have a role then in ensuring the identity rights of Irish children born to surrogates abroad. That would be important. They are the kind of hard legal functions, but they could probably have a very important informational function as well. It would be very helpful for people exploring surrogacy if information was provided by the Irish regulator that would tell them what surrogacy in different jurisdictions looked like and what procedures they would have to go through. In Ireland at the moment people have to go to a solicitor and hope that he or she is an expert who will tell them what to do. The regulator would have a very important role in that. I do not think it could necessarily approve foreign arrangements in advance. That might be a bit beyond its remit, but information would be really valuable to people and it would also put them off going into arrangements that are problematic. There are situations at the moment whereby occasionally people enter surrogacy arrangements abroad where there is no genetic relationship to either intended parent or only a genetic relationship to the woman and those people have no way to establish parentage. Usually, it is the case that they just did not know that. Most people would not do that if they knew the situation they would be in when they came back. Information would be really important.