Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We are debating two different things. One is best interests, which we debated in one of the previous amendments in terms of its primacy. I accept the ombudsman's hazard position. I just hold a different position for the reasons we have set out. The specific amendments are about the grounds on which a judge can grant a parental order, even if a biological parent, a surrogate or both are saying they do not want this. There may be reasonable grounds for that, but there may be unreasonable grounds and those are the ones I have been discussing over the past few days. What the Deputy is seeking to do with her amendments is essentially where we are looking to go. The advice we had until recently was that this was covered and that there was sufficient discretion for the judge to do what we all want in the best interests of the child. We are all trying to achieve the same thing. We got recent legal advice which stated something different. The constitutional link is very strong and requires some careful consideration. All I am doing is giving my Department and the Attorney General's office more time to come up with a legally robust version of the Deputy's amendments. That is all it is. The best way to do that procedurally is to crack on and get this Bill passed. We particularly want to commence the sections around retrospective and give these parents and children access to the courts for these parental orders, in parallel with some robust legal provisions in the amending Bill to cover the exact situations we are concerned about.

See this speech in context