Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I bring the good news to the House that the Cabinet has finally approved a framework for legislating for surrogacy in prospective and retrospective cases. I am very grateful for that. Surrogacy is not something you choose - it chooses you. Generally, if you are a woman, surrogacy will be the option because you have had a series of illnesses and losses that have been very dramatic. It will also be the option for a gay couple who want to have a family together. We now have a provision for the State to ensure children have a right to the certainty of both their parents and a right to their identity and birth information being registered in the State. This is all built on a child-centred approached based on the Verona Principles. We will be the first state to legislate for them, which will be quite extraordinary. We also have a circumstance now whereby surrogates are protected and supported to ensure that they are not open to the possibility of coercion or being in any way exploited by having preconception safeguards in place to ensure their rights and entitlements are protected at all times. We also have legal certainty for parents to have a lifelong relationship with their children, and with both of their children.

I thank the Ministers involved. I thank the Minister, Deputy McEntee, for her considerable work, because much of this was within the remit of the Department of Justice and the officials there worked extraordinarily hard over the summer months following the report of the Joint Committee on International Surrogacy. I thank the Minister for Health, Deputy Donnelly, and the officials in his Department. I thank the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, who assisted from the perspective of children. I pay great tribute to Professor Conor O'Mahony for his extraordinary report on the rights of children and the protection of children within surrogacy in Ireland. That report laid the groundwork in respect of this matter.

I especially thank the members of the joint committee, which was under the leadership and chairmanship of Deputy Whitmore. I thank Senator Ruane and Deputy Funchion, as well my colleague, Deputy Higgins, and Fianna Fáil colleagues, Senators Clifford-Lee and McGreehan and Deputy Murnane O'Connor, for the hard work that went into arriving at an ethical standard and framework for this State. Extraordinary collaboration and moving forward together went into this. It was a real example of what can be done. We had to do an extraordinary amount of work in a very time-sensitive manner.

Most of all, I pay tribute to the families in Irish Families Through Surrogacy and Irish Gay Dads who bore their souls and told of the plight and hardship of not being recognised as their children's parents in Irish law. I am very grateful that this is coming. We need to see the legislative amendments and move this through the Houses with speed. There are families in precarious positions where either the biological father has a very serious illness or there has been family breakdown that places the second parent in a very vulnerable position and the children looking at not having access to that parent or not having that legal certainty. The devil will be in the detail of the amendments. I look forward to them. I am grateful to the Attorney General's office for working so hard on this matter. Yesterday was a great day to be celebrated. It is the beginning of the end of discrimination against our children.