Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This has been a very useful engagement. It is worth noting that the principles are aspirational, and until such time as they are embedded in an international agreement, we will have to deal with the imperfect and take the principles as guidance. They will certainly be influential in our thinking as a committee in our recommendations for Irish law, but we must also wrestle with that imperfect.

Last week, we had before the committee a former UN rapporteur who talked about the surrogate mother needing to be recorded on the birth certificate, yet we have the difficulty that we in Ireland cannot prescribe what is going to be on a birth certificate in another jurisdiction, and another jurisdiction may have legal frameworks that allow and oblige the intended parents to be recorded on the birth certificate. Currently, for parents leaving a country with a baby to come home, there are mandatory reporting elements obliged by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs as part of applying for an emergency travel document for that child. The parents must contact the health board to notify it that the child is about to arrive into the jurisdiction. They must then notify the courts to expect that there are going to be legal proceedings and the parents must give an undertaking on that. We need to have a mechanism, possibly within the Irish courts system as part of that mechanism, whereby there is a mandatory notification at the point of travelling home to oblige registration on a surrogacy certificate or surrogacy register and which aligns with a pre-conception agreement or phase - something along those lines. That is probably going to be a suggested workaround from me for the fact we must deal with the imperfect and yet want to make sure the child has the right to know everything about himself or herself. Have the witnesses seen models of that? In their consideration, how do we deal with the fact we cannot legislate extrajudicially for another jurisdiction?