Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Today I want to bring good news to the Seanad that yesterday a memo went to Cabinet regarding the special purpose surrogacy committee. This special three-month committee, with the possibility of a fourth month, will deal with complexities and hopefully find a pathway to parenthood for mothers of children born via international surrogacy. I thank the three Ministers - the Ministers for Health; Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth; and Justice - who have driven this initiative. Particularly, I want to thank Minister for Justice, Deputy McEntee, for her drive. She has taken this on board and has been particularly passionate about it.

Children have a right to a legal relationship with their mother in our State for the entirety of their life, not just until they are 18 years of age, as the law provides for at the moment. Women who are represented by the likes of Irish Families Through Surrogacy talk about the devastating health issues they have had. Others have suffered multiple miscarriages on the pathway to holding their baby for the first time. They deserve not to be discriminated against in that pathway to their parenthood. Their parenthood should be acknowledged in the State. It is not reasonable that they are reduced to guardianship and custodianship as the only solution. While that is something, it is not parenthood of much longed-for and much wanted children. There are also issues regarding same-sex couples and making sure they have the recognition of parenthood.

As a final point on this, surrogacy is not the only area where mothers are discriminated against at the moment. When a same-sex female couple whose child was born in natural birth outside the State comes back to Ireland, the spouse of the birth mother is not necessarily entitled to become an acknowledged parent. There are other anomalies here, not just international surrogacy, that we need to address. I look forward to that.