Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

The Constitution should lay down principles and it should not lay down statute law. This whole issue is immensely complicated. Currently in the case of married parents, owing to the statutory presumption of paternity set out in section 46 of the Status of Children Act 1987, that a married man is presumed to be the father of all the children born within that marriage, either or both parents are allowed to register a birth. This creates a situation that can be difficult and it is a question of whether that should be changed to name the biological father which could cause a few interesting hours of debate in the first place. The reference to both parents seems to place a duty on both parents to attend to register in all cases. This is likely to be impractical and potentially unworkable in some cases.

Section 22(2) appears to propose the imposition of a duty on all parents to give the registrar particulars of the other parent, without exception. This presupposes that a woman must be aware of the identity of the father in all cases. It may well be that this is not the case and the imposition of such a requirement may be in breach of the rules of natural justice. Other jurisdictions such as England and Wales have provided for exceptions to similar provisions involving lack of consent, age, incest and unknown identity etc. I could go on with the problems this will raise. I accept the principle but the details lead to a major amount of challenges. For example, section 22(3) proposes to require the registrar of births to enter the particulars of the named father as given by the mother in the register of births following the issue of the notice to the father unless he rebuts paternity within a period as may be prescribed, in which case the registrar shall refer to the District Court for direction. The proposal appears to place an inordinate duty on the registrar in assisting in the determination of paternity matters, currently appropriate only to the parents and the courts. We have a Law Reform Commission that is expert in examining the potential complexities of a change in the law. We should allow the Law Reform Commission to do its job, issue a report and then examine it carefully. It looks simple but it is not. The more one goes into it, the more complicated it gets and one must ask if one wants to go down this route because we may be creating more chaos than we are solving. This is not a case of running away from a hard decision but ensuring that if one is changing it, it is changed for the better.