Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

Several of these amendments are in my name. Amendment No. 17 proposes that the birth should be registered prior to placement for adoption. That is in some ways a separate issue to that addressed in the other amendments which deal with the father. It is an extraordinary omission that the birth does not have to be registered before the placement for adoption. Deputy Shatter's amendment seeks to address the definition in the Bill of "father" as a person who believes himself to be the father. What I am trying to achieve in my amendments is that the father's name be registered.

The only time a father would not be registered is when the mother has completed a statutory declaration to the effect that the father is unknown, missing or cannot be traced. The related amendments also deal with this issue. I do not believe we should write out of history fathers of children who are being put up for adoption as if they do not matter because there are consequences to doing so. The consequences of this are that fathers believe they do not matter, as is the case in many other situations.

I have been a feminist for a long time and I believe in women's rights. However, fathers' rights are being consistently walked on in this State. This legislation virtually ignores the rights of the natural father. It states that a father can be consulted but that he does not have any real say whatsoever in his own child being put up for adoption, which I believe is wrong. In the same way as we look back now and wonder how 30 or 40 years ago we in this society allowed women to be walked on, we will look back in years to come and wonder how we ignored fatherhood or considered it to be unimportant. These amendments are about valuing fatherhood. While a father might not want to know or be interested in his child's adoption, that fact should be at least recorded and considered to be important. Where a father wants to be involved, that, too, should be considered important. This should be facilitated in this legislation.

These amendments are about challenging the type of assumptions we make. I am often visited in my clinic by people who have written out fathers from the lives of their children. Often these are fathers who have fathered many children with different mothers. We are in this legislation seeking to be child centred. A child has a right to a natural father and natural mother. We will not achieve all of these cultural changes of which I speak in one piece of legislation. However, we need to acknowledge this issue in this legislation and to begin to redress the balance so that we consider fatherhood to be important, not alone well-heeled middle class educated fathers but all fathers. Unfortunately, this is not the reality.

I referred earlier to an article by Mr. John Waters in last week's The Irish Times in which he describes a situation in which two people meet and discover they have the same natural father and the huge dilemmas this causes. The reality is that in Irish society this could happen relatively easily. While I accept this legislation will not address all of those issues, it needs to acknowledge that a natural father is not someone that can be ignored. As Deputy Shatter stated in regard to his amendment anybody can claim to be the natural father of a child and be given some kind of credence.

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