Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this important debate. I want to begin, as other have, by welcoming our visitors in the Gallery and all of those who have worked for so long to see a properly regulatory framework in place. This includes organisations like Irish Families Through Surrogacy, Equality for Children, LGBT Ireland and Irish Gay Dads. I also want to thank all the individuals from civil society, academia and legal practice who have worked on this. I am thinking of Professor Conor O'Mahony, Annette Hickey, Maeve Delargy, Claire O'Connell and others.

I want to particularly commend the Chair of the surrogacy committee, Deputy Whitmore, and her Vice-Chair, Deputy Higgins, and the committee for producing such a clear, thoughtful and sensitively written report in such a tight timeframe. I was appointed Chair of the Joint Committee on Gender Equality, and we thought we had a tight timeframe of nine months to consider the recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly on Gender Equality until we heard that Deputy Whitmore's committee was being given three months. I want to commend the surrogacy committee on producing this report in such a timely fashion and on the urgency it brought to bear on this.

I am glad, on behalf of the Labour Party, to support the recommendations. I will highlight a number of issues that have been brought to my attention. I know the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, and the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, have been engaging with groups and individuals on these issues. The Labour Party has a strong track record of pushing forward necessary legislative reforms to regulate child and family relationships and to ensure diverse family forms are recognised. There is a cross-party consensus on this.

I will speak briefly about the work of the Joint Committee on Gender Equality. Our committee recommended in December that a referendum should be held to ensure that the Constitution is amended, not just to delete sexist language about women and mothers, but also to insert a gender-neutral recognition of the value of care and, crucially, to recognise more diverse forms of family beyond the family based on marriage. I am glad the Government has committed to holding that referendum in November and that is clearly of huge relevance when we debate child and family relationships legislation because we need to ensure that our Constitution recognises diverse family forms too, which is important.

As a member of the Joint Committee on Justice, I was actively involved in a previous debate on the regulation of surrogacy in the lead-up to the passage of the Child and Family Relationships Act 2015, which was originally intended to include regulation on AHR and surrogacy. We did not get to do that because there was an urgency about passing the legislation prior to the marriage equality referendum taking place, but I am conscious of how complex this area is to regulate because it was something we could not do then. None of us on that committee foresaw that it would take nearly ten years before we would come to finally see legislation brought forward and there has been such terrible uncertainty for so many families, some of whom are in the Gallery, during that period.

There is a real urgency, particularly in respect of the retrospective declarations that need to be made. That is recognised and I welcome the fact that the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, as I understand it, has confirmed that the retrospective declarations process can proceed before the framework for prospective declarations is fully in place. That is certainly-----

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