Joanna Tuffy (Dublin Mid West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I may not have done as much work on this as Deputy Coppinger. Many of the people who have suffered domestic violence are married and have husbands. That is agreed by everybody. Nobody is going to put conditions on the guardianship rights of a married father, as we almost certainly could not do so under the Constitution. The family is based on marriage in the Constitution. I presume that is where the logic is for both married mothers and fathers to have automatic guardianship rights: married fathers could not be discriminated against when compared with married mothers.

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