Ms Natalie Gamble:

It is about separating clearly in one's mind what the status of the children is and whether they have recognition in the right families from a separate question, which is how we can encourage intended parents and surrogates to go to good jurisdictions overseas, or not to go overseas, and so on. It is a mistake to use parentage, which affects children, as a tool to affect behaviour. It should not matter what the circumstances of children's conception are. They have a right to belong to the right family. On restriction or regulation, the policies that encourage parents to do things in the best possible way are important. Those include how friendly the environment at home is. If it is as liberal as possible and as supportive of parents and surrogacy as possible, including safeguards such as pre-conception checks, sensible advice, counselling and so on, and if that is facilitated at home, it will encourage more people to stay. If it is restricted and can only happen at a specific type of clinic in Ireland and if people are certain types of parents, that will drive people overseas to places where Irish law has no jurisdiction to control what happens. It is necessary to be realistic about what can be achieved, rather than stating that we do not like commercial surrogacy in some jurisdictions, so we will not recognise children as having status if they are born there, because that conflates two separate issues.