Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Thank you Chair and I thank all four of our guests for being here today. When Ms Embury started her contribution I was thinking it would have been great to have her in for the legal session earlier. The more she spoke, however, I understood why she is speaking at this session because she has so many insights around surrogates, their personality types and the supports that they need. It is really interesting to have that conversation in the presence of three absolutely amazing surrogates. I thank Ms Embury for her contribution and for sharing those insights with the committee. I thank Ms Armstrong, Ms Schiewe and Ms Embury for their really personal stories. Ms Schiewe, in particular, really delved into a lot of trauma and that helped us to understand her reasons for deciding to go down the surrogacy route and for being here today.

It is so important that these women all have such different stories and such different backgrounds but the thing they have in common is the fact that they really wanted to help other families who were not as lucky and who could not become pregnant as easily. I have so much respect for all three of the guests for that. They speak about surrogacy with pride - like it is the most wonderful thing ever - but I am sure it is a tough decision to arrive at so well done and congratulations to them for being so brave.

One of the discussions we had earlier on in the committee was with a lawyer from the United States who spoke about the preconditions that surrogates have to fit in order to be considered in certain states. One is that they are over 21 years old. A second one, which struck me, is that they already have children and that they would undergo counselling and evaluation and have their own independent legal advice. From our perspective as a committee, we are tasked with coming up with recommendations for how this would work in Ireland and how, if we are to agree bilateral agreements with countries such as Ukraine, what best practice should look like. Given that the three witnesses have been through that process, I would really value their opinions on whether those kinds of things - like age, whether they had children already, whether they were willing to undergo psychological evaluation - would work for the witnesses? I think having legal advice is fairly standard. Do they think this is something that would have been offputting or do they think they would have been happy to sign up for that? Perhaps they did sign up to all of those conditions unwittingly, without knowing they were conditions, or maybe knowing that they were conditions, depending on their situations?

As a comment rather than a question, I would like to particularly welcome Ms Holub, not just to our committee but to Ireland. I read her story in the newspapers and thought it was really interesting how she spoke about blood donation and surrogacy. I had never thought of it in that way and it is such a simple analogy. I thank her for sharing that with me.

My questions for the three witnesses are around those requirements or eligibility. Could they give us some examples as to whether they think these requirements are fair or unfair or if there is anything they might add or take off the list of conditions? I would value that.