Professor Conor O'Mahony:

When we talk about legal principles about non-discrimination, the law treats people differently all the time in all sorts of scenarios. An assessment in an individual case of whether a particular classification violates non-discrimination principles comes down to that question of whether it has a legitimate policy goal it is trying to achieve, whether it goes further than necessary in achieving that and so on. In that respect, the idea it is saying guardianship rather than nothing at all is the idea of trying not to go any further than necessary.

If you go the alternative route of saying that everyone gets parentage irrespective of whether identity is protected or not, that creates a different inequality. It creates an inequality where some children have a right to identity and some do not. My thinking was trying to create a scenario where as many children as possible got both parentage and identity protected. My thinking was the scenario most likely to achieve that was the one laid out in the report, because for all the reasons we have heard today, people want parentage - that is what they want - and therefore people would opt for that. The guardianship thing in the background was just something to try to nudge them in that direction and that the number of people who might end up using it would be smaller than the number of children who might be born without an accessible right to identity in the other situation.