Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

What the Minister is failing to do is to acknowledge any of the best research which goes to show that there is a particular social benefit associated with children being brought up in marriage. I am in no way being judgmental in respect of other people in this regard. On many occasions I have referred to the heroism of long parents, in particular. We also acknowledge, however, that many such individuals require additional support and we should give it to them. The idea that lest one be portrayed as being judgmental, one should have nothing to say regarding the body of research which states that - all things being equal - it would be better if children were raised within marital families really speaks volumes about the culture of spin.

This is not about setting up a hierarchy of family types, it is about the State and society preferring particular situations and proposing this in the laws that are brought forward. It is also about the State regulating to prevent that which it can prevent, namely, an industry that brings children into the world in a way that deprives them of their father or mother or both. Where that situation cannot be prevented - and life gives rise to all sorts of situations - the State should move in to support the individual families involved. That to which I refer would give rise to a true child-centred balance and it would not lead to lone parents being re-stigmatised. Instead, it would lead to such parents being supported and it would also promote the right of every child, as far as is practicable, to have his or her own father and mother in his or her life.

I do not understand why the Minister felt it necessary to revisit the situation of hundreds of thousands of children. Nobody is placing their situations at issue. We are saying that, as would be the case with any other item of legislation, account should have been taken of what the research shows. Why is the Minister afraid or unwilling to do that? Why is it that, in the context of this issue alone, the Government is not interested in evaluating what the research shows? It has gone in the other direction and painted a dystopian picture of certain traditional married families by highlighting the obvious point - as if we did not all already realise it - that some of these families fail. There is no such thing as the perfect family and no one is claiming that such an entity exists. However, saying that does not give one the right to blind oneself to the reality that the research does tell us something about families. The Government has never acknowledged in the course of the debates on the legislation before us that there is something to be said for the family or for the father-and-mother relationship with children. I must reiterate the fact that it is anti-child to so willfully ignore the research to which I refer and to make no accommodation for it in the context of the framing of policy. I am opposed to those who pretend that if accommodation is made for it, then we are somehow stigmatising other people. That is sheer intellectual dishonesty and it is also socially reckless.