Professor Conor O'Mahony:

The simple answer is "No". In my three years as special rapporteur, my approach has been to maintain an open-door policy in my dealings with Departments. I have always been very happy to discuss any of the issues arising, be it specific recommendations made in my reports or more general issues arising in everyday law and policy work. I have always been happy to have those conversations. I have had conversations at various points with officials from the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth about ongoing work in their remit. That is a very helpful and productive way to do things, especially on something as technical and complex as surrogacy, to ensure people are not speaking past each other. It would have been good, and still would be good, if there was an opportunity to have some of those conversations to try to work out some of those points of detail, but to date it has not happened.