Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister has not provided any basis for the selection of 12 months as the magic number. Will she do so? In the context of the 12-month period, how is cohabitation established? The Minister also stated that information will be "readily available". I do not know what that means. As far as I can see, the Bill or the amendments do not provide for information to be made available, and that is why I have suggested an amendment that the registrar of births "shall be required to inform" people of their rights to make a statutory declaration. There is woolly stuff there about information being made available, and this needs to be set down in law. Just as provisions have been set down that the registrar must inform people that there is additional information on the issue we discussed earlier, why can this not be done for parents with regard to the right to make a statutory declaration?

I cannot understand why the Minister will not provide for a record of statutory declarations. How does a person who has made a statutory declaration establish that as the case five years afterwards if he happens to have mislaid the declaration? Why can a register not be provided? An important point was made by Deputy Tuffy that unmarried fathers' rights are frequently overlooked when it comes to adoption. That is a major problem, which was a feature of a recent legal case in which somebody with no blood relationship with the child ended up having superior rights to the genetic father of the child. Given that the Law Reform Commission and the special rapporteur, Dr. Geoffrey Shannon, have both clearly recommended automatic guardianship, why is their advice being ignored?

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