Fine Gael’s spokesman on Justice, Charlie Flanagan, has said that same-sex adoption should be legalised as part of the Government’s Civil Partnership Bill. 

Speaking on Thursday on the Government’s introduction of the Bill, Mr Flanagan said that he was “very concerned about the glaring omission of children from the civil partnership provisions”. 

Mr Flanagan said that the Bill’s omission failed to acknowledge that an estimated one third of the 2,090 same-sex cohabiting couples registered in the 2006 Census, have children and that only the biological mother of the child in each of these cases is recognised automatically as the legal parent of the child. The partner has no such legal relationship even when the partner is the only other ‘parent-figure’ the child has ever known. 

Under current law, children have an automatic legal relationship with the people raising them only if those people are a married mother and father. No other combination of adults raising children together receives the same legal recognition. This is due to the special status of marriage in Irish law and because of the importance to a child of having a married mother and father. 

Deputy Flanagan also cited studies purporting to show that children who are raised by same-sex couples “do just as well as those raised by heterosexual couples”. 

However these studies quoted by Mr Flanagan have been found to contain a range of fatal flaws. They are invariably very small, they often lack a random sample, they are rarely longitudinal, they often do not contain objective measures of a child’s well-being, and often they compare single-mother lesbians with single-mother heterosexuals. They also rarely take account of the fact that lesbians who raise children are often from upper-income families, or that the children raised by lesbian couples are often the product of previous heterosexual relationships and have often had the active involvement of a father in their lives for at least a period. 

Mr Flanagan claimed that it was “unusual not to address children in a scheme for Civil Partnership” and urged the Minister for Justice include provision for same-sex adoption in the Bill. 

In the High Court ruling in the Zappone/Gilligan case in 2006, Justice Elizabeth Dunne said that the Government could be justified in treating the studies referred to by Mr Flanagan “with some caution”.