Rónán Mullen (Independent)

Senator Buttimer was right to defend my colleague's honour but he did something many people have done in the House today. He has argued against points that were not made. I heard people making arguments about the Catholic Church's teaching, for example, as though people opposing the Bill wanted to enshrine the Catholic Church's teaching in the law.

It is a fact that marriage under our Constitution is regarded as special and to be protected in a particular way. It flows from this that one would seek that any legislation touching on marriage or other relationships would maintain the centrality of marriage as the preferred social norm. That is, if one likes, the elephant in the room - the underlying constitutional position. It is a position which the Government is not ready to deny, at least not yet.

Senator Buttimer makes the mistake in that he thinks in some way, by our suggesting any references to "civil status" be changed to "marital or civil status", we would be undermining the essential provisions of the Bill, when nothing could be further from the truth. It does not undermine any of what the Bill actually provides for but it selects a kind of nomenclature that sends out a cultural and social message about the centrality of marriage. It says more about other people's willingness to undermine marriage that they would have a difficulty with what is being proposed here and that they seem to resent the idea that marital status would be kept in a central way. What Senator Buttimer does not seem to have recognised or realised, or what his comments did not recognise, is that this is not just about what is in this Bill. The Bill amends many other Acts and it therefore has implications for existing laws and for existing references in those laws-----