The Government’s Children and Family Relationships Bill, which is currently being debated in the Seanad, has been strongly criticised by Senators Ronan Mullen and Jim Walsh.
Independent Senator Ronan Mullen accused the government of the same kind of groupthink that led to the banking crisis, and said that the Bill “wrecks the Government’s credentials as defenders of the best interests of children.”
Senator Jim Walsh of Fianna Fail said that the Bill did nothing to safeguard a child’s right to have a mother and father, and said that in failing to restrict the use of donor eggs and sperm the Bill “in no way respects the genetic kinship of (donor-conceived) children and completely disconnects legal motherhood and fatherhood from genetic parenthood.”
Introducing the Bill to the Seanad, Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said that “The starting point in this legislation is the best interests of children. This is the golden thread running through it.”
Senators including Labour’s Ivana Bacik, Independent David Norris, and Fianna Fail’s Averil Power were broadly supportive of the bill, though the latter called for a European-level commitment that would ensure donor-conceived children would be able to find out the identities of their biological parents.
Senator Mullen, though, said that the Bill made no recognition of a child’s right to have both their biological parents involved in their life, even though this was protected by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and had been acknowledged repeatedly by special rapporteur on child protection Geoffrey Shannon.
He criticised the Ombudman for Children and the Children’s Rights Alliance’s submissions on the Bill, both of which, he said, made no mention of this right.
“There is still an opportunity to place children’s rights, as opposed to the desires of adults, at the centre of the legislation. I have no confidence that the Minister has any willingness to do so. However, I will table a series of reasoned amendments which seek to place children’s interests and rights back at the centre of the legislation” he said.
He continued “Failure to ban egg and sperm donation in the Children and Family Relationships Bill is a big mistake. The failure to allow children born of assisted human reproduction to know their genetic parents until they are adults is also a mistake. It is difficult to comprehend that in the first draft of the legislation it was not proposed to allow any right for children to know their genetic parents. That shows how far removed from children’s welfare and best interests the class of people who have devised the legislation were, until a hasty amendment later in the day to at least give children the dignity of finding out who their parents are if they seek the information when they are 18, yet people say this is a children-friendly piece of legislation. What rot. To reiterate, the singular failure of this legislation is that it removes, as a matter of policy, any preference for a child’s genetic mother and father to be in his or her life. That is unfair and unjust.“
Senator Walsh said that the Government was pushing the Bill through with “unseemly haste” and that the best interests of the child were being made “subsidiary to a perceived political imperative.”
He said that as a child of a single mother and the father of three children, he had a “a deep conviction about the benefits of two-parent upbringing, as well as the right that children have to a father and a mother.”
“Supporting marriage” he went on “is not about attacking other relationships but about recognising that it is the bedrock upon which a strong, fair and stable society is built.”
He also criticised the portion of the bill dealing with donor-assisted human reproduction, calling attention to the recent case in Britain in which a woman acted as a surrogate mother for her own son and gave birth to his child.
“The Bill allows use of sperm or eggs of other family members. Such confused family relationships, well removed from the norm, will at the very least generate confusion and inequality among children. It raises the most profound and difficult ethical and child welfare issues. Does the Minister still think it is right to rush this Bill through both Houses?”
“A child-centred Bill should not permit the natural ties to be severed deliberately, depriving a child of a mother or a father or both. This commodification of children Bill, as it stands, is a betrayal of our republican heritage and our Republic, creating, as it does, fundamental inequality for children. Some will have a mother and a father but some will not, by diktat of Government and the Legislature” he said.
Senator Feargal Quinn also expressed reservations about the Bill, saying that arguments from Professor Ray Kinsella and Keith Mills from the Mothers and Fathers Matter campaign group had “influenced me to think in a way that I might not otherwise have thought.” He said that he “did not know” whether the legislation would promote arrangements where children are intentionally denied a mother or a father, and said he found it hard to believe that the Bill was constitutionally “watertight.”
