Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have two amendments in this group. I will not be moving any of my amendments. They are merely there for discussion purposes. I flagged to the Minister's officials that this would be the case. Before I get into them, I will address a couple of things. There were a few chestnuts that were always predictable so let us nail those here and now. The first is the quotation from the Ukrainian ombudsman or special rapporteur. I will clarify that there was an attempt to contact that person and to bring him before the surrogacy committee. It is not true that he was totally rejected. There was an attempt but we were in the early weeks of the war at that stage when everything was difficult in Ukraine and we were accepting people arriving in Ireland without any documentation or anything like that at all. There was an attempt to locate that individual and to invite him before the committee but that did not happen. I just wanted to correct that error. It is very handy to deploy the vulgar language he used about our children and families. His vulgarity should not be repeated by any parliamentarian anywhere. He was being dramatic in being absolutely and utterly vulgar in his description of families. That anybody would have the audacity to use the word "market" is really quite appalling. Let us just park that.

The next issue is the description of surrogate mothers as people who "allow themselves", the use of that terminology and saying that this is similar to the arguments made when we were talking about prostitution. Is the Senator serious? We are in a philosophical space where it is okay to control women and to presume everything about how they make decisions regarding their own bodies. To presume that they are all poor, which they are not, and to make all of those other assumptions is really quite outrageous. It besmirches the women and their dignity, autonomy and agency. While I know it suits a certain agenda to cast everything in that light and to say that I do not know what I am talking about and that I am wrong, I actually do know what I am talking about. I have been in this space for a long time. I have seen the research and I have spoken to practitioners. We had experts from the University of Cambridge before the committee rather than the one or two exploited women who come onto webinars and talk about how dreadful their lives were and the dreadful decisions they made and that people around them made. Theirs are not the only examples; there are a great many others. The idea that women who act as surrogates would be besmirched as people without agency and people who are totally exploited is absolutely outrageous. We had one of them in the Gallery last week and I am glad she is not here today because I am quite sure she would have come over the screen in sheer annoyance. That is an outrageous characterisation of women involved in surrogacy and of the role they have played in our lives. It also undermines the care they were given by parents throughout their pregnancies. I reject that.

As regards the proposal to alter the years of residency required from two years to five, what happens if your sister who has been living in Australia comes back? That amendment would catch all sorts of things were it to be accepted. It just would not work. Furthermore, we have the idea of free movement. I get the two years. It is sensible. I would be cautious about characterising all of the women in Ireland who have come from Ukraine as particularly vulnerable. Many of them are fantastic contributors to our society, to our hospitals and to our communities and take on roles of great responsibility.I have two amendments under this group. They arise out of an issue the Minister knows may be a problem. I spoke this morning about the commission report in 2005, which talked about it because surrogacy was a reality in Ireland in 2005. We have children that old. There is a provision in the Bill whereby the application for parental orders may be made by an adult child. The adult child might be an applicant. Why would they want to do that and why is guardianship insufficient? It is insufficient because it does not create a life-long legal relationship. All of the things that flow from parental order are things like inheritance and all of those things like decision making about parents and children. All of those things flow from parental order and parental status between children and their parents. I have had this clarification and I appreciate all of the work that is being done. For the benefit of the people on the other side of this Chamber having heart attacks worrying about it, and the people they support and speak about, there is a request. To be fair, I have been corrected as it is not in the proofs required for court. In the definition of a domestic or international surrogacy agreement, while there are a couple of different versions, it states the requirement that a surrogate has to be somebody who was habitually and lawfully resident for a period of 12 months. The problem is, if you are a child born via surrogacy in 2005, what are your chances of being able to prove that? It may be that you are in contact with the surrogate, but we may not have proofs. She may have moved country. There are other situations. There is a war in Ukraine. A lot of Irish children were born in Ukraine. There may not be documentation to prove where they were or that they were in that state for that period of time. Even in Ireland there may be difficulties where people moved, or where a sister or a friend who came home from abroad was here for less than that period. At the time of the surrogacy, therefore, they did not know this was going to be a requirement and may not be able to comply with it. I consider it to be deeply unfair, if not bordering on unconstitutional, to have to retrospectively apply something that it may not be possible to satisfy. There will be circumstances where we must permit the possibility that surrogates may not be contactable, may not be found, or may have moved from the addresses people have for them. Those families relying on the waiver of consent in circumstances where she cannot be located will be caught in that and unable to prove that. There needs to be a discretion, and that is what is behind this. That residency requirement is causing a lot of anxiety because there is a legitimate fear it may not be possible to satisfy that in those instances. I have been careful, and I am not asking the Minister to accept my amendment, but I worded it to reflect the integrity of parents in this space. There will be exceptional circumstances in past domestic and international surrogacy arrangements where that requirement needs to be set aside out of sheer practicality.