Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Fianna Fail)
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Question 572: To ask the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform if he will consider correspondence (details attached); and if he will make a statement on the matter. [15288/10]

Dermot Ahern (Louth, Fianna Fail)
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The Civil Partnership Bill 2009 gives same-sex couples the option of registering in a civil partnership, conferring a range of rights and obligations, including in relation to succession, shared home and financial matters. Marriage, under the Constitution, continues to attract particular protection, and is understood as a matter of constitutional jurisprudence to be only between one man and one woman, ideally for life. Civil partnership is distinct from marriage and in no way diminishes its special constitutional status.

The Civil Registration Act 2004 provides that it is an offence for a registrar to fail or refuse, without reasonable cause, to register a birth, stillbirth, marriage or death. The Civil Partnership Bill amends the 2004 Act to replicate these provisions with respect to civil partnership registration. Neither the 2004 Act nor the Bill contains a "right of conscience" provision for registrars. Registrars routinely register marriages of people who are divorced from a previous spouse, and the matter of freedom of conscience has never been raised in relation to such marriages.

The Employment Equality Act 1998 and the Equal Status Act 2000 provide that it is an offence to discriminate against a person for employment purposes or in the provision of goods and services on the basis of gender, marital status, family status, sexual orientation, religious belief, age, disability, race or membership of the Traveller community. The Civil Partnership Bill amends the Equality Acts to extend this protection to civil partnership registration by replacing the marital status ground with a new "civil status" ground.

The Bill does not contain any exemption from the obligation not to discriminate in the provision of goods and services, whether on the basis of religious belief or otherwise. Providing such an exemption could lead to serious unintended consequences and service being withheld from people in all sorts of situations - from a bank refusing to allow a couple operate a joint account, to a restaurant refusing to take a booking for two men or two women, to a person's partner being unable to visit in hospital purely because an ambulance took a patient to a religious-run hospital. Such outcomes would be directly contrary to public policy, therefore a 'freedom of conscience' exemption could not be countenanced.