Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I stand in solidarity with the Leader's remarks and support her in them. Last Sunday, Daniel Murray published an article in the Business Post with the headline "Government to defer legislating for international surrogacy services". I appreciate that there is momentum and that hard work is going on behind the scenes. I probably know more than most about just how much is going on and how many meetings and so on are taking place. The Ministers from the Departments of Justice, Health and Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth have met five times in the past year to move this along, because it is within those three Departments that needs and issues have arisen. However, headlines like that and the repeated delays do nothing but cause fear and horror for families across the country whose children were born via surrogacy.

It is not that there has not been an incredibly ethical framework put forward that safeguards the rights of children and puts them first and that safeguards the human rights of the surrogates and parents. There are women around this country who are not entitled to sign permission slips for their children in school and who have been rejected and told that they are not the mothers of their children. There are children who are being teased about this in school. There are children who were born via surrogacy who are shortly to turn 18, because that is how long this has been going on in this country, and who will now never have that legal relationship with their parents because they will be adults. Mothers are being denied legal connection with their children and children are being denied legal recognition of their relationship with their mothers and the provisions regarding inheritance from parents and grandparents that flow from that. The delay is appalling. Will the Leader please write to the Ministers to seek clarification and to urge that legislation be hastened through and that, under no circumstances, should the Bill on assisted human reproduction registration be published without surrogacy, both domestic and international, being comprehensively addressed?