Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)

Part 1 sets out the required particulars which shall be registered in respect of a birth. Additional information will be required to be registered including the personal public service numbers of the child and his or her parents, the dates of birth of the father and mother and their marital status. It will also be necessary to record the birth surnames of the father's mother and the mother's mother. The particulars required to be registered for a birth were first set out in 1863 and remained unchanged until updated by the Registration of Births Act 1996. The 1996 Act provided for the registration of a surname for a child, the mother's address and the occupation and former surname of the father. Those particulars were further amended by the Social Welfare (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2002 which provided for the registration of the personal public service number in respect of each of the parents and the assignment of a personal number to the child. These changes were required to facilitate the introduction of the new electronic civil registration system.

Part 1 of the First Schedule includes other changes among which is the recording of the marital status of the mother and the father, the surname at birth and any other surnames of each of the parents of the child and the details of each parent's mother's birth surname. This additional information is required for the allocation of the child's personal public service number, the verification of the parent's personal public service number, the creation of family relationships between the child and the parents, the administration of a person's public service identity set and the auto-triggering of a child benefit claim. The additional information to be captured by this amendment is not required for the purposes of registration, vital statistics or the allocation of a personal public service number. The amount of information and the cross-tabulation in place are more than adequate.