Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is very welcome. I also welcome our friends in the Public Gallery, Maria, Johnny and, of course, Damien, who gave us a very good and clear explanation in the briefing beforehand. I commend our colleagues in the Labour Party on this important and timely Bill, on which we are having a very good debate. All the contributions have been valuable and measured.

As an old-fashioned republican, I believe in a complete separation of of church and State. That is what we have to achieve and aim for. Frankly, it is offensive in 2022 that we discriminate between families who are married and those who are cohabiting, to use that phrase. It is just not right and it is not what a republican would ever believe in.

Let us talk about the figures. According to the 2016 census, Ireland had approximately 150,000 cohabiting couples, of whom more than 75,000 were cohabiting couples with children.What I hope we have established this evening, thanks to our colleagues in the Labour Party and the Bill, is that we need a major overhaul in legislation to improve the rights of these couples across the board. The Bill is a significant step in that regard and Sinn Féin supports it. We make no bones about it. The Bill will ensure cohabiting couples will have equal rights to the widow's pension and be treated in the same way as married couples or civil partnerships. It is important to point out the hypocrisy in our legislation at it stands. As has been pointed out, cohabiting couples are recognised for the purposes of calculating the income of social welfare applicants. When it comes to the widow's pension and the widow's grants, there is no longer recognition of a cohabiting couple even when they have children. To lose a loved one and then discover that the State does not even recognise the relationship reflects a cruel and antiquated view of family relationships. Our legislation needs to keep up with the times and the issue needs to be addressed as soon as possible. I agree with Senator Buttimer. Our country is way ahead of us in this. It is something we should have acted on before now.

My colleague, Deputy Kerrane, among others in the Dáil has raised this with the Minister many times. In fairness, the Minister said she would look at it. However, I am not clear from her contribution exactly how much work has been done to date. I acknowledge that we seem to be in a process, particularly in respect of the joint Oireachtas committee and those recommendations that will come out, hopefully before the end of the year, as she said. The point that concerns me, and I do not mean this in a cynical way, is in respect of the timescale we are working towards. I ask the Minister and her colleagues on the Government benches to think again about postponing the Bill for 12 months. In 12 months, we are going to be three and a half years into the lifetime of the Government. There will only be a year left. This will not be a popular thing to say but I am going to say it: I do not see changes happening in that last year, particularly if a constitutional change is required. We should move more quickly. As someone who has steered two Bills through this Seanad, it is not something we do quickly. It takes time. I do not see the need to postpone the Bill for 12 months. It would be far more constructive to acknowledge that we all broadly agree on the need for change. That has been made clear across all the benches here this evening. Why go to the trouble of postponing the Bill for 12 months? Why not acknowledge that this is an important contribution to a debate that we all feel needs to happen? We all believe we are behind the times in addressing this. There are real families affected by this. As others have mentioned, we have all dealt with people in our constituencies and clinics who are bewildered by the fact that right now when they most need help, there is no help available to them. That is fundamentally wrong.

I take the Minister at her word and note the line in her speech where she rightly said that for those who are suffering a terrible loss there is no difference in that pain if they are married or not. She is absolutely right. The people who are in the Gallery want us to address how we are going to move forward. With the greatest of respect, we are not going to move forward by postponing this Bill for 12 months. The great thing about the Seanad is that on a number of occasions we have worked collegially across party lines. We have done it on a number of issues. We should do that here this evening. We should not postpone a second reading of the Bill for 12 months. We should recognise that we all agree on the broad principles we need to apply. I accept that it is complicated. The Minister should send these people a positive message this evening and the best way to do that, on which I appeal to Government colleagues in a collegial way, is for them not to appoint tellers if they are going to press this amendment. They do not need to press the amendment. Let us give this Bill room to breathe and grow. There may well be significant amendments that need to be made but we have time to do that. If we postpone the Bill for 12 months, given the way governments work, with the best intentions in the world, unfortunately the reality is that we probably will not see real movement on this issue until another government is formed.