Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is the same group of amendments. The Minister referred to legal requirements. The essential thing is to make sure insofar as we can - we cannot be absolutely certain about anything - that a man or woman is not faced with a big legal battle in the middle of all the other trauma that is ongoing for him or her. It is a significant time in their lives. If something can go wrong, usually it will go wrong. The Bill states that AHR treatment shall not provide PGT-M or PGT-SR except where "the provider is satisfied, founded on a relevant opinion" that this is necessary. I suggest that "relevant opinion" could be contested at great length. The difficulty I could see arising - we have all dealt with these individual cases previously - is where a legal problem stops everything, and everything is frozen. Even though everything possible has been done to avoid it, I am concerned about whether there has been or will be enough oversight, supervision and cross-checking in dealing with this group of amendments along the lines I suggested with particular reference to legal issues that may or may not arise. There may be challenges in all directions because what happens in these cases nowadays is the competence of the authorised person giving the information is usually challenged by somebody else on legal grounds and it is about something totally different from what it started out as. I would like to be assured that adequate provision has been made to avoid as far as possible those kinds of scenarios.