I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."
On behalf of the Labour Party, I am delighted to be bringing this Private Member's Bill to the Dáil for Second Stage debate today. Before I begin, I thank the advocacy groups, many of whom have joined us in the Gallery today, including LGBT Ireland, Equality for Children and Irish Gay Dads, as well as Labour LGBTQ+, who are sitting upstairs too. In particular, and it is always difficult to single out a few individuals, but I would like to thank Dr. Claire O’Connell, for her immense work in the drafting of this Bill, Pádraig Rice, Maeve Delargy, Ranae von Meding and Elaine Cohalan among the many who have been involved in the campaign to bring us to this point. I also thank in particular the families, including many babies, who have shared their stories, putting a face to these issues and bringing them into the spotlight. Many of these families and babies joined us on Tuesday in a very colourful photo opportunity outside of Leinster House, a cross-party opportunity which we organised to highlight the issue here. I also thank Chloe Manahan, my political adviser, who has done a great deal of work in bringing the Bill to this point.
This Bill is an important milestone in Irish life, and I appreciate that the Minister is attending the Chamber to take the Bill. It will make fully real the Ireland that people voted for in the 2015 marriage equality referendum. The Labour Party has been a proud and very vocal ally of the LGBTQ+ community for decades. This Bill represents another page in the long chapter on the Labour Party’s role in fighting for LGBTQ+ people. My predecessor and then Tánaiste, Eamon Gilmore, aptly described marriage equality as the civil rights issue of our generation. I am proud of the role the Labour Party played in securing and winning that important referendum in 2015. While that campaign was won, as we all know, we have more work to do and there are still issues to address, not least legal issues. Passing this legislation would mark a further step towards realising the full equality that people in Ireland voted for in 2015. If passed, this Bill would finally allow for the children of all same-sex female couples, in particular, to have the right to a legal relationship with both of their parents. It is a matter of children's rights. I welcome again the families in the Gallery and note that they are particularly affected personally by current shortcomings in the law. I thank them and their representative organisations for their openness in bringing their stories to us, to the public and to me and my Labour Party colleagues, and to explain to us what this means for them.
Not being recognised as a parent of your own child in law is a cause of deep hurt to many parents in our country. It says to them that they are invisible, that they are effectively a ghost parent and that they do not exist in the eyes of the law. There is hurt to the children, crucially, too in failing to secure a relationship in law with the parent. This Bill would address that hurt and recognise parents as they are. It would recognise that they have planned for these children together with their partners and that they are both parents and recognised as such in law.
This is not just an issue of huge concern in terms of the hurt and distress it can cause. Not being recognised as a legal parent of your own child also has practical implications in terms of a child’s right to citizenship, inheritance and travel. The non-biological parent is able to apply for guardianship of their child, but only when the child turns two, and guardianship ends at the age of 18 and the child is then back to being a legal stranger. I think we all acknowledge that guardianship is not good enough.
Parenting, by its nature, is filled with worries, as all of us who are parents will know. We worry about how children are doing at school, whether they will get sick and how they are getting on. Being a parent without recognition in law brings a whole other set of unnecessary worries about what would happen if the biological parent died or in all sorts of scenarios, in particular, what would happen to the children. These worries are very real. In our view, children in Ireland should not have to wait any longer to be treated equally. They deserve the same rights as their neighbours and classmates, regardless of how they were conceived or where they were born.
Families in Ireland should not have to wait any longer to be treated equally. LGBT+ people, like so many groups which have been historically marginalised here in Ireland, have, unfortunately, become accustomed to having to fight for their rights. They fought for their very identity to be decriminalised in this State. They fought for laws to protect them from discrimination, and many Labour TDs and Oireachtas Members have fought with them and ensured the passage of enlightened legislation. In recent years, along with fighting for marriage equality, we fought to end employment discrimination against LGBT teachers, doctors and medical staff in schools and medical settings. We fought for gender recognition and we have now achieved legislation on that. We are still fighting for appropriate trans healthcare and for the right for families to receive equal legal protection. We want to ensure that people do not have to fight any longer. We want to ensure that our laws catch up with the reality of family diversity in Ireland and that the wishes of the Irish people from 2015 will be respected in ensuring we have equality for families.
What does this Bill do? It proposes amendments to the Children and Family Relationships Act 2015, itself groundbreaking legislation that regulates donor-assisted human reproduction. I am conscious that the Government has introduced the Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) Bill 2022, which is currently on Committee Stage. That is welcome. The AHR Bill, as well as regulating surrogacy and other matters, itself proposes amendments to the Children and Family Relationships Act 2015. These are amendments the advocacy groups that have been campaigning on these issues for many years are delighted to see. However, there are some ways in which the Bill does not go far enough. It does not close all of the gaps in the current legal framework, which is where our Bill comes in. The Bill seeks to address those gaps. The advocacy groups which have joined us in the Visitors Gallery today have provided legally robust means of filling the gaps. We and those groups want to work with the Minister to ensure the provisions in the Bill we propose will become law, whether in this Bill or through amendments to the Government’s legislation.
The main gaps this Bill is designed to address are the following: first, for children conceived using known donors prior to 4 May 2020, which is the day the 2015 Act was fully commenced; second, for children born abroad; third, for children conceived abroad; fourth, for children conceived, whether in Ireland or abroad, through non-clinical insemination or at-home insemination; fifth, to ensure that children born to same-sex female couples can have access to citizenship through either of their parents; and, sixth, to introduce a provision on judicial discretion.
The first point is to ensure that children conceived to known donors prior to the commencement of the 2015 Act will be covered. Currently, the 2015 Act creates a set of parameters for recognition and children who fall outside those parameters are not covered by law. We know that an amendment to the AHR Bill has been tabled which would address this issue. We want to ensure that that amendment is accepted and the legislation is enacted and commenced to ensure children in that scenario are covered.
The second issue concerns children conceived abroad. Clearly, this can happen for a number of reasons. Our Bill proposes solutions whereby intending parents who have gone through screening, have confirmed the consent of those involved and have registered identifying information can be granted a declaration of parentage.
Further, we want to ensure that children born abroad can be covered. We know there are many instances where children are born abroad to a couple who are living in Ireland and the children will then be brought up here in Ireland. Our concern is to ensure that those children will be brought within the scope of the 2015 legislation. It is of note that the Government’s AHR Bill amendments on Committee Stage will provide a pathway to parentage for some children in this scenario. What we want to achieve with this Bill is to ensure there is a pathway to parenthood for same-sex female couples, who will be able to apply for a declaration of parentage in our courts.
The fourth issue is non-clinical insemination. We know that rates of infertility among same-sex female couples will be similar to the rest of the population. While there is no need for such couples to obtain the services of fertility clinics, which can be costly and medically invasive, we know that some couples may feel this is not sufficiently private and personal for conception. All families are different, so a variety of reasons may underpin a preference for non-clinical options, but that choice is really not there in practice. Reasons that have been given for the requirement to use a fertility clinic, which are reasons the Minister has given, are to ensure the child's right to identity and, of course, we fully appreciate that. We also know that the Minister wants to ensure that relevant medical information is provided. Again, this Bill proposes solutions that ensure the child's right to identity is vindicated and that relevant medical information is available, while also allowing parents to apply for a declaration of parentage.
I have also referenced the issue of citizenship. We are concerned about cases where passports have been difficult to access for the children of same-sex female couples where the Irish mother was not the mother who had given birth. We believe that citizenship by descent should flow from the non-biological or non-birth parent as well as the biological parent and, again, amendments are proposed in this Bill to address that issue.
The sixth issue relates to the lack of provision for judicial discretion. As somebody who formerly practised law myself, I know the courts are capable of and well used to applying discretion, particularly in family law cases, where it is often very important that there is some scope for discretion. Judicial discretion involves the application of the paramountcy principle so that in cases involving a question of parentage, the best interests of the child should be the paramount consideration. We would like to see this applied to cases of parentage related to donor-assisted human reproduction to ensure the best interests of the child are always the paramount consideration.
Having spoken about the contents of the Bill, I want to turn to the procedural point. I welcome the fact the Minister is not opposing the Bill and I recognise that, but I want to express my disappointment that the Government has decided to table a nine-month delaying amendment. I know that nine months is preferable to the 12 months that we have seen for other Bills, and just last night, Government TDs voted to delay by an entire 12 months the Labour Bill that we introduced last week on reproductive healthcare leave, another important Bill which would provide for leave for the first time for women who experience early pregnancy loss before 24 weeks or those who need to access reproductive treatment and need time off work. That Bill has been delayed by a year and we are conscious that tactic will effectively mean the Bill will not proceed any further because we know the Dáil term will have to end within a year. The nine-month delay is somewhat preferable and I would be very glad to have the facility to work with the Minister and the advocacy groups to see that the provisions and principles that we have put forward in this Bill could be brought into law through a different mechanism, if necessary through amendments to the Government’s own AHR Bill, and it does not have to be through our particular Bill. However, we do want to see these measures brought into law before the end of the term of this Dáil.
It is somewhat ironic, given the topic of the Bill, that the nine-month period has been used by the Government. We are going to oppose that delaying tactic but assuming that the nine-month delay is passed, we hope to work with the Minister and his officials to see how best we can address the gaps in the current legislative framework to provide for parentage of children. It is always frustrating for Opposition parties to see these delaying tactics in place, but it is particularly frustrating at this stage in the lifetime of the Dáil. As I said, we know that an election will have to be held by the first week of March 2025, so just over a year remains.
The likelihood is that in nine months, which would bring us to the end of October, we will have had a general election. I know nobody is saying that but I think we are all conscious that it is a likely date. Therefore it is more than likely that in nine months, this Bill will have fallen. That is the frustration that all of us who have campaigned on it are experiencing now. It will effectively put a stay on the entire process unless the Minister can give us a commitment, and I hope he can, that he will work with us and with campaigners to see how best we can progress measures that are needed to ensure equality for families and for children. As I have said, we will more than happily engage with the Minister. We are very happy to work with him. We are not wedded to this particular Bill but we want to make sure the gaps we and campaigners have identified are addressed. We have an opportunity with this Bill, or with collaboration on its provisions, to instigate a shift which will be transformational for families. While the numbers may not be huge, for some families this will be really crucial. For some of the families with young babies and children that I have met, it will be an absolutely transformational change.
The Minister campaigned for marriage equality, as I did, and as we did across the House. Realising the full intention of that historic vote in 2015 must involve collaborative work to make equal all families – and, importantly, all children – in the State. In a child’s eyes there is no difference between their biological and non-biological parent. There should be no difference in the eyes of the law. This Bill provides a mechanism to ensure that equality.
