Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It would be remiss of me not to point that in the 2019 report, the second report by the former special rapporteur, she notes that she identified three main responses to her conclusions in the 2018 report. Several states and civil society organisations rejected the premise of sale outright in the context of surrogacy, arguing that at no point is there a transaction for the child. A substantial number of stakeholders expressed concern about the conflation of sale with surrogacy, which could lead to a criminalisation of surrogates and intending parents, as well as the possible violations of the right to sexual and reproductive health. The report also stated that a number of states and civil society organisations argued for the outright ban on surrogacy, without exception. I note that the former special rapporteur acknowledged there was discomfort with the idea of putting sale into surrogacy when people do not enter the vast majority of surrogacy arrangements with the intention of buying a child. That is not to say there are not outliers because there certainly are.

The people who are being left out of this conversation are the intending parents. We are talking about the surrogates and the children but we are not talking about intending parents who in good faith are on a fertility journey to express their inherent desire to have a child. They do not have a right to a child but they have a right to go on that journey and explore it as a possibility. That is important.

Another thing we are not saying this morning is that in an international setting where the intending parents are included on the birth certificate, those parents have the same right to make decisions around their child because they are the recognised parents from birth in that country. A little bit of what we are talking about is slightly idealistic because there is no lacuna as long as the child stays in the country in which he or she is born. The lacuna happens the minute the child steps on a plane and comes to Ireland. The idea of an interim guardianship order would cover that issue.

It should then be judicially reviewed in the context of parental order in Ireland, which would be a very important measure.

We have not touched on retrospective. We cannot put in place a system that first discriminates against countries where the intended parents are on the birth certificate. From a retrospective point of view, I propose we need a bespoke solution that sets aside all the rules, guidelines and frameworks we will put in place, and sets out a set of circumstances in which people underwent a legal route in other countries. We have a situation whereby children are being discriminated against and that needs to be addressed urgently with a bespoke solution in Ireland.