Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I plan to speak on the thirty-ninth amendment to the Constitution, on the family, and my colleague, Lynn Boylan, will speak to the fortieth amendment, on care. As a member of the special Oireachtas Committee on Gender Equality, I played a very active role throughout 2022 on these issues, as did Senators Alice-Mary Higgins, Lisa Chambers, Regina Doherty and Pauline O'Reilly. I commend the committee Chair, Deputy Ivana Bacik, all the members, the secretariat and the witnesses who came before it. Our job was to examine the report of the Citizens' Assembly on Gender Equality, which was chaired by Dr. Catherine Day. We regarded the recommendations of the citizens' assembly as a blueprint for achieving gender equality in Ireland. Our work was focused on how best to secure the recommendations' implementation, so we did that. We provided a final report that is very much an action plan for change with reasonable timelines for implementation. I am disappointed - many others share this view - that the constitutional changes proposed do not reflect the wishes of either the citizens' assembly or the Joint Committee on Gender Equality. I wonder why we went through that whole process, what the citizens' assembly was for and what the Oireachtas committee was for. I wonder why the Government did not just propose this wording in the first place and why it needed years of delay.

The Joint Committee on Gender Equality finished its work and produced its report in December 2022, and it took a whole year for the Government to bring forward this wording. The wording as presented by our committee had cross-party support. It had support from civil society and trade unions too. It is, for me, a big letdown that the wording proposed by the Government is such a departure from the wording proposed by the committee. It has been mentioned many times that the Oireachtas committee made the unusual or uncommon decision to draft proposed wordings in our reports, first in an interim report on constitutional change and again in our final report in 2022, called Unfinished Democracy. We were minimalist in our approach. We wanted to ensure that the language we used was in keeping with existing constitutional language and constitutional text so we built on the existing text. Single-parent families, non-marital families and any family that does not conform to the constitutional model of family based on marriage deserve protection. I think we all accept that. The committee and the citizens' assembly did not suggest the term "durable relationships". That is entirely new language proposed for the Constitution. I wonder - I am not the only one wondering this - why that language was chosen. It does not seem to be prescriptive. I am not a constitutional lawyer but do we not need language that has established legal meaning? There seems to be very little buy-in at the moment for this proposed wording. Sinn Féin and other political representatives are concerned about the language used in the proposal.

Why has the Government moved so far from the recommendations of the citizens' assembly and the Joint Committee on Gender Equality? That question must be asked.As Senator Sherlock and others have mentioned, the expansion of constitutional protection to families founded on other durable relationships raises many questions about what the amendment will mean in practical terms and the implications for law and policy on social welfare, taxation, succession, family law and beyond. In the absence of that information, there is a risk of confusion among voters. It also heightens the risk of misinformation around the proposal.

Sinn Féin believes the Government should outline the research that has been conducted about the implications of the family amendment on existing legislation. The interdepartmental committee, which was formed to prepare for the referendums, compiled lists of legislation that refers to family and marriage. We think the Government should publish those and any research conducted by the committee, the Office of the Attorney General or others about the impact of the proposed amendments. We also believe that the Government should commit to expanding State supports for families, including through taxation and social welfare, to at least families based on long-term cohabitation. It should also commit to additional supports for single-parent families. We believe we are heading in the right direction but there is a need to look at the wording and the interpretation and to deal with the implications.