Mr. Gearóid Kenny Moore:

I thank members for giving me the opportunity to address the committee. I am here on behalf of the Irish Gay Dads organisation. Irish Gay Dads was formed seven years ago and today we have more than 1,000 members and followers. Our group was formed to give gay men and those interested in becoming parents, or those who are parents already, the opportunity to exchange ideas, information and build friendships. The options for Irish gay male couples who wish to become parents are very limited. As members know, the placement of children for adoption in Ireland is rare and the main international locations accessed by many Irish-based adoptive parents will not work with gay male couples. Many of the well-known international surrogacy locations also decline our applications, meaning most of our membership who have become parents have done so through gestational surrogacy in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

I am one of the lucky ones. Together with my husband, Seamus, we are the parents of three amazing humans. Mary and Sean are aged three and a half years - that half is really important to them right now - and our baby daughter Anne was born nine months ago. Our journey to parenthood was long. It was stressful. It was emotionally and financially draining but ultimately we got here. Seamus and I started to speak about having children shortly after we met in 2009 but we genuinely did not know where to start. We knew we could not do it here in Ireland because there was no legislation in place to support the IVF clinics, so we started our journey through the Canadian system. We chose that system for lots of reasons, including that the rights and responsibilities of everyone, namely, those of the donor, the surrogate mother and the intended parents, are clearly defined and understood under Canadian law. Each party to a journey in Canada must receive independent legal, psychological and medical support. The Canadian system is both child- and surrogate-centric. The surrogate mother retains full bodily integrity throughout the process, including the right to terminate. However, parental rights are transferred to the intended parents before conception, thus removing for the intended parents what is a major source of stress in a typical surrogacy journey.

By 2014, Seamus and I had saved the money needed to start this life-changing journey. We were very naive. We assumed that, given all the parties in our journey had no underlying health issues, this would work for us and work quickly. How wrong we were. Four unsuccessful embryo transfers later, we were left childless. Our hopes for a life as parents were gone, with no clear understanding of why this was the case. Our IVF clinic simply could not explain it. After this setback, we had to take a significant step away. We were broke, both emotionally and financially.

However, having begged, borrowed and sold over a period of about 18 months, we started again, at a clinic in the United States because Irish clinics were still unable to help couples like us due to the lack of long-promised legislation. This time, a friend of ours living in the UK offered to act as the surrogate mother. I cannot adequately explain her decision to do this for us, despite having spoken to her several times on the issue. However, I know she was and is happy about and proud of that decision. She continues to be part of our children's lives, with regular phone calls, photographs and face-to-face meet-ups. For some reason, things were different on this journey. Our first embryo transfer worked. After seven years of talking and thinking about it, we finally had a positive pregnancy test. Our twins, Sean and Mary, were born in England in 2018. They were followed by baby Anne in June last year.

Despite the lucky position I find myself in, as the committee has heard from other speakers today, parents like us face significant, avoidable issues as we work through normal family life. Our issues began as soon as we returned to Ireland, when we attempted to access child benefit for our newborn twins. As the committee may know, this payment is traditionally made to a child's mother. In the case of a family like mine, where no mother is present in the daily life of our children, requesting that the payment be made to the father is considered an exceptional situation by the Department of Social Protection. Due to the lack of legislation existing today, no uniform policy can be put in place by the Department for applications from families like ours. As a result, how the application is received and processed depends on factors such as the experience, skills and attitude of the person one meets in the local welfare office. When we attempted to secure child benefit for the twins, our application was referred to head office for further analysis and scrutiny. This resulted in us being required to write a letter supporting our application and to engage in an interview regarding the circumstances of our child's conception, birth and family life in order for the application to be approved.

As previous speakers have outlined, these difficulties continue for the Kenny Moores as we progress through normal family life. Issues like vaccinations, passport applications and crèche enrolment all require us to find workarounds. I am tired of inventing workarounds. We need legislation.

Even once guardianship is granted to the non-biological parent, the problems do not go away. Guardianship can only be sought once the child reaches two and it ceases at 18. I genuinely dread the moment when our children blow out the candles on their 18th birthday cake. Once that happens, our family foundations will be shattered. From the State's perspective, from that moment on, our relationship will be classified as adults who happen to live at the same address.

The final issue I want to highlight is more difficult to quantify and qualify. It is the emotional and psychological issues that arise for parents and their children when their family unit is not adequately recognised and protected. I am proud of how much Irish society has matured and, in my opinion, progressed, over the past 30 years. I am proud that, together with my husband, Seamus, we knocked on the doors of all of our neighbours in 2015 to get their permission to marry each other and to become a legal family of two happy husbands. However, now that we have added three children, genetically linked to each other and to one of us, our family of five is not recognised. That frustrates me, to say the least, and it confuses me.

Growing up in the midlands as a gay person in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s was not easy. It was a crime. However, I grew up knowing that I was a good person from a good family and a good community, and that I lived a life based on good values. However, the sense of being treated in an inferior way simply because of my sexuality did damage to me. For many gay people like me, the label attached to them by the State and the resulting treatment by broader society has hugely inhibited their life experiences, career choices and, in too many cases, their life expectancy. When the State or important institution within it labels people in an inferior way because of the circumstances of their birth and how they love, it damages them. Today, I believe that similar treatment is being applied to my family and my children. It is my opinion that those in authority with power have looked at my family and have so far concluded that because of how and where our children were conceived and born and because of how their parents love each other and them, their family does not meet the standard.

I do not yet know what precise damage that will do to our children, but my lived experience tells me some damage will occur. A couple of years in the future, when they are in the early days of primary school or some other social setting, a bully might tell them their family is not a proper one, though the words he or she would use would probably be much more hurtful and direct. While Seamus and I will give them the understanding and language needed to deal with this, unless appropriate legislation is passed to address the legal issues faced by families like ours, I feel the State will be complicit in validating prejudices expressed by that bully against our children and my family.

The legislation we are asking for and need has been spoken about at Government level for a long time. I ask the committee members to please use the positions given to them to act on my behalf and on behalf of mammies like Ciara and Ranae, whose stories they have heard today, and on behalf of the thousands of children already born and yet to be born through international surrogacy. Finally, I ask on behalf of the many families like Elaine's who have been ignored so far by the provisions of the Children and Family Relationships Act. I thank the committee for its time.