Professor Conor O'Mahony:

Surrogacy comes in many different forms. We know there are many different combinations and permutations as to which parties provide the necessary genetic material in a surrogacy arrangement. Ultimately, from the point of view of the international children's rights standards that guided my work for my report and the work of the UN special rapporteur, they do not have all that much to say about the different versions of surrogacy and exactly who contributes what to the process. What the standards say about their key guiding principles including best interests, non-discrimination, right to family life, right to identity and those principles, particularly the non-discrimination element, make it very clear the circumstances of the child's birth, including which parties contributed which genetic material, should not have any bearing on the level of legal protection for those various rights a child enjoys.

As to the issue of various emerging economies and different levels of regulation and so on, this is precisely why I am concerned with seeing regulation in Ireland of international surrogacy arrangements that would provide clear standards that must be met before Ireland recognises any international surrogacy arrangements, in order to avoid precisely the kind of concerns the Senator has alluded to arising. The Government's proposed approach of leaving the issue entirely unregulated completely fails to address that because it creates a situation where the child is brought to Ireland, there is nothing in place the parents must prove or no standards they must meet. They simply find themselves, two years after the child is born, with a guardianship application that has no consideration whatsoever of the nature of the surrogacy arrangement or the standards applicable in the country where it took place. My concern is that approach, that absence of regulation, magnifies the concerns the Senator has alluded to there and that if we are really concerned about them the approach to take is to have bespoke legislation that puts in place strong regulation.