Catherine Byrne (Dublin South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this very important Bill. I am 100% behind the referendum because it is all about equality and we cannot and should not measure equality. We are either equal or we are not, and that is basically it. This referendum will ask the Irish people to consider whether Article 41 of the Constitution should be amended so as to allow couples to marry without distinction as to their sex, which I believe they should. The Constitutional Convention recommended the introduction of same-sex marriage and marriage equality, and I thank it for its recommendation to bring this forward.

The Government has committed to putting this referendum before the Irish people and I hope they will support it. If passed, people in this country will be able to enter into civil marriage regardless of their gender. The referendum is not about religion or religious marriage. It is a contract between two people. Some may say that same-sex couples have civil partnership and then ask is this not enough. I believe it is not. Allowing same-sex couples to marry and enshrining it in our Constitution gives these couples certainty that their union is legal and recognised in law. This is about the personal lives of two citizens and an expression of their love and commitment to one another. It is about respect for each other, even if there are differences or even different beliefs and values.

Marriage is all about love between two committed adults who promise to love, cherish and protect one another. Being a married woman, I lean on my husband deeply in terms of our dreams, our hopes, our disappointment and even our anger. I believe having somebody to stand beside you in those difficult times is very important. Who am I to say same-sex couples cannot marry and express their commitment and love in the same way as heterosexual couples?

As a mother, if one of my children told me in the morning they were gay and wanted to marry their partner, I would support them unconditionally. Any parent only wants what is best for their children and wants them to be happy. I would be very aware of the challenges they would face and, in many ways, I would give them a little extra support.

This Bill does nothing to undermine marriage between a man and woman, whether they marry within the church or outside. Some people have raised the question of children in the context of this referendum. This referendum has nothing to do with adoption or same-sex couples having children. It is all about equality and love, whereas all of those issues will be dealt with in the Children and Family Relationships Bill which is currently going through the Oireachtas.

I welcome the Bill on the grounds that it speaks about equality and it speaks about love. Most of all, it speaks about the commitment of two people in their lives to enter into a partnership, whether they are a man and a woman or a same-sex couple. I want to finish with a line I came across a few weeks ago while reading. It says that the only true measure of human success is love and, without love, even the ones who appear to be most successful are nothing more than the clouds that appear great and powerful in the morning but have disappeared by the afternoon. To me, that reflects what this referendum and this Bill are about. As we campaign for this referendum, I would urge all of the people out there to consider their own children and how they would feel if they were tomorrow asked by their sons or daughters, or by grandchildren or great-grandchildren, to love them and to cherish them as much as they did those other members of their family who marry into religious marriage.

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