Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am aware of the very pressing needs for parents with children where those legal relations have not been properly established. That being said, I do not think we could promise to provide for the retrospective element beforehand. This has to be done in the one package. The Government has committed to addressing the issue of retrospective parentage and has set out a range of criteria in terms of how that will be assessed. These criteria will include establishing that the surrogacy was not unlawful at the time in the relevant jurisdiction; that it was a purely gestational surrogacy; and that the surrogate mother has provided her consent to the granting of a parental order of surrogacy. The process needs to have those safeguards I referred to, including safeguards for the child, the surrogate mother and for the attending parents. The issues involved in proposing legislative measures for transferring the assigning of parentage in relation to past surrogacy arrangements are highly complex and that is why we are taking that bit of time across the three Departments to draft proper legislation.

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