Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

The Adoption Board's annual report for 2008 indicates that 217 out of 273 applications for adoption, or 79%, and 128 out of 200 court orders, or 64%, were in respect of birth mothers and their husbands. Similarly, the annual report for 2007 indicates that birth mothers and their husbands comprised 217 out of 303 applications to the board, or 72%, and 138 out of a total of 187 family adoption orders, or 74%.

The overwhelming majority of domestic adoptions are by biological mothers adopting their own children with their husbands. The Adoption Board has been calling for legislative change for more than 20 years. We can change the law in two ways. The first is to allow a guardianship order to be made in favour of the spouse who is not a parent and the second is to allow the spouse who is not the biological parent to seek an adoption order while the biological parent retains equal rights to the child.

I do not buy anything the Minister of State has said. He advises us that we should not amend the Bill at this late stage even though these amendments were canvassed at great length on Committee Stage in February. This afforded him four months to consider our arguments. He stated that he favours a guardianship arrangement but he voted down my amendment allowing for guardianship orders simply because the Law Reform Commission produced a working paper but not a final report. Given that the commission has published a plethora of final reports which were not implemented, this is not a valid reason for rejecting my amendment. He suggests that all sorts of complications arise in implementing my proposal but that is not the case because the spouse married to the biological parent would have to be properly assessed and deemed to meet all the criteria set out in legislation.

This is an important amendment which will bring the ethos of our law from 1952 to the present millennium. The Bill is consolidating rather than reforming and it has abysmally and scandalously failed to implement 95% of the reforms recommended by a broad range of reports commissioned by the Government and other organisations. It is my intention to put the amendment to a vote.

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