Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I listened to every word that Senator Seery Kearney said. I always find her sincere and impressive. I think she is wrong on a number of things she said. She was allowed to speak, quite rightly, without any interruption from the Chair. I insist on the same treatment for myself and for Senator Keogan as well. During my equally long intervention, when I tried to address all the points that had come at me, I was interrupted several times by the Chair. I demand equal respect from the Chair for all sides in this House. I just want to put that on the record quite clearly.

I want to return to something I did not address earlier, which is the Minister's exhortation to those who see themselves as pro-life to see that surrogacy entails the bringing into the world of new life. Once a new life is in being, that life takes precedence and respect for that child takes precedence. That is why pro-life people are opposed to abortion. It is why I agree with the limited contribution of the Ombudsman for Children when he said that once this situation comes into being - namely, the relationship between the child and the parents who have brought the child into being through surrogacy arrangements - under the Convention on the Rights of the Child there has to be a recognition of that right for the sake of the child. My view is that this should be addressed through guardianship and through ancillary legislative or regulatory mechanisms that ensure the child is in no way disadvantaged.

However, I also believe that in order to discourage it from happening prospectively, there should be penalties where people engage in surrogacy arrangements because it is against the interests of future children. This question of where the test of the child's best interests comes into play was commented on by Professor Conor O'Mahony when he talked about the application of the best interests principle and suggested that really it ought to be something that addresses the real-life circumstances of an individual child rather than the hypothetical circumstances of unidentified children. I take that point. That is why I support measures that allow for the recognition of the relationship in being in respect of the intending parents who have brought a child into the world through surrogacy, that being in the child's best interest. I think that best interest can be achieved by recognising the legislation for the individual rights of the children and providing for a position of guardianship. However, I think penalties are needed, as I said, to prevent it from happening in the future.

I think it was Professor Conor O'Mahony who said to the Oireachtas committee - I will say in passing that I pitied anybody who had a dissenting view on that committee - that almost all international surrogacy arrangements have a commercial dimension at play and asked how else one is to identify a surrogate internationally. I do not know whether he is at peace with what the Government has done. I have not consulted him on that point. I would give him credit for having said that much but I stand by my criticism of the children's ombudsman for failing to call out what is going on here. It seems that for the children's ombudsman and so many other children's rights advocates, the child's rights only begin once the adults have got what they want. Heaven protect us if it should ever become the fashion at the embryo screening stage to deprive children to be brought into the world of a limb, or something else that could be achieved with the horrors of modern science. It seems that the best the Office of the Ombudsman for Children could say in that situation is that the children should be enabled to have prosthetic limbs once they are born, but it would have nothing to say about the circumstances in which they are brought into being.

Let us be clear. The child's rights should take precedence from the beginning the child's life happens. It cannot be logical to say that because you are pro-life and you respect all human life, you can never have quibbles with the way a child is brought into being. For God's sake, we all condemn coercion in sexual relationships where that leads a child to be brought into being. The child is innocent of the wrong circumstances in which they were brought into being. What we are saying here is that surrogacy arrangements intentionally deprive the child of certain things that a child should always be considered entitled to. It is suboptimal to bring a child into the world knowing that they will never have mother love. It is suboptimal to bring a child into the world in a way that intentionally deprives them of ever, for example, having access to their mother's breast milk. It is one thing for these things to happen normally and naturally as a result of life circumstances; it is another thing to put your own desire for parenthood ahead of what a child is entitled to expect, whether that child is in being or not.

Anybody who denies that there are real human rights concerns being expressed here is in cloud-cuckoo-land or is in absolute denial. Senator Seery Kearney talks about people's dreams and people dreaming of being parents. I completely sympathise, but in life we do not always get to realise our dreams at the expense of others, and nor should we, but that is what is going on here. People are being enabled to realise their dreams - their very natural human aspirations - but to have them realised in a way that does injustice; first and foremost to the women in the context of international surrogacy who are exploited in their poverty.It is horrendous that any First World, civilised, human-rights-respecting country would allow this. It is not rich women who carry babies for poorer women but rather poorer women in their economic disadvantage who grasp at this opportunity to make money from financially advantaged people. It is shameful we smile on this by regulating it.

It is not about people's dreams, as important as people's dreams are. There is something more important. We cannot put a whiff of incense on all of this by saying we are determined to regulate this in an ethical way when what we are doing is fundamentally unethical. Senator Seery Kearney talked about the preciousness of embryos, and I thought of Alice in Wonderlandand how words mean whatever I describe them to mean. How can she talk about the preciousness of embryos when this very legislation contemplates the screening out, the destruction of and the experimentation on human embryos? To say that at the heart of this is how precious we realise human embryos to be is not the reality of this legislation.