Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will ask the parliamentary reporters to do a cut-and-paste job when preparing the Official Report. The amendment is about restricting close relatives from donating gametes to create a child and to avoid the "I'm My Own Grandpa" scenario. There is an obvious and troubling lacuna in the legislation and it is clear that, for the child who results from DAHR using relatives as donors, there is a serious and deliberate blurring and entangling of the legal and biological family links. The child's personal and family identity becomes confused and complicated by these procedures and intergenerational donation is also a possibility under the Bill. It occurs when a mother donates an eggs for use by her daughter or a daughter donates an egg for her mother. In the former case, the child's biological mother is treated in law as his or her grandmother and the birth mother is in fact giving birth to her own half-sibling. The scenario could be rendered as my ma is my own grandma. From the child's perspective, his half-sister would be treated in law as his mother in the case of the birth mother giving birth to her own half-sibling. Under the Bill, the child will be told that his or her maternal uncles and aunts will also be half-siblings. The children, who under this Bill the law will treat as first cousins, will be his nephews and nieces. It is so crazy that it must be worked out in advance in order to write it down yet the Bill has nothing to say about the possibility of all of that besides going right ahead and saying that we will not interfere. The Children and Family Relationships Bill puts no restriction on the use of DAHR to avoid either the deliberate procreation of a child whose genetic parents are blood or half-blood relatives and the deliberate procreation of a child in circumstances where the structure of his or her family and extended family, as a matter of law, will contradict that structure as a matter of nature and biology. This is because there is no provision in the Bill to restrict or regulate the use of sperm or eggs provided by a donor who is related, even very closely, to one of the intending parents. The rationale for extending the ban to spouses, civil partners and cohabitants of the intending parents is that these are all persons who may or may become entitled to be deemed a legal parent of the child conceived and hence the same issues of confusion between the biological and legal family could then arise if, at the time of the procedure, the donor was a relative of such a spouse, civil partner or cohabitant.

Examples of cases covered by the media highlight issues that can arise. The British TV personality Mary Portas recently made public that she and her female partner had a son through IVF using the sperm of Portas's younger brother. Under English law, and this Bill will introduce the same problem here, the boy's father as a matter of nature and genetics is his uncle in the eyes of the law and his mother in the eyes of the law is his aunt. If Portas's brother has children of his own, they will be half-siblings of Portas's son. However, in the eyes of the law, they will only be his first cousins. I could not make this up yet this is the new reality when the Government and legislators decide that it is only about whatever the adults want and all of this talk about children's best interests is just such hollow hypocrisy in the light of what it is proposed to tolerate. I hope the Minister accepts there are issues in respect of donors related to the intending parent, and I have not mentioned all of them, which require amendments to the Bill. On Committee Stage, there was reference to prohibition of incest and all that but it should be quite clear that in any legislation that proposes to recognise parents and the status of who is the parent in a given situation, this should have been thought of and consideration should have been given to those situations. If a same-sex couple wants to bring a child into the world and the sibling of one of them provides the sperm and the other partner provides the egg and is the carrying mother, it is unfair to a child to confront him or her with the reality that his father is his own uncle and whatever else follows from the bizarre concatenation of events imposed on a child in this situation. I ask the Minister to address it. While I have addressed the amendment in tones of irony, I assure the Minister it is not in tones of levity. I refer to what is allowable now in the world where donor assisted human reproduction is provided for in this way, which is happening in the world. In earlier responses to amendments, the Minister was quick to point out what is happening in other jurisdictions and the direction the law has taken under the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence but the Minister must also be attentive to what is happening in the world now and how permissive and disregarding of children's rights the law in other jurisdictions has become. The Minister should explain to us why she is taking the law in a similar direction here.