Official guidelines on surrogacy are to be published next month by the Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter (pictured).

However, he was unable to say when long-promised legislation for the wider area of assisted human reproduction would be published, according to the Irish Times.

The aim is to help parents planning to have children via surrogate mothers abroad to ensure they are recognised as legal parents here. This is despite concerns that surrogacy exploits women from poorer backgrounds and creates identity issue for children as it ‘splits’ motherhood.

Mr Shatter said a “consultative process” has begun between officials in the various Government departments on the wider issue and he hoped progress would be made next year.

His remarks came as the Government has been under pressure to introduce surrogacy legislation after it emerged that the parents of one child were not recognised by the Circut Court as the child’s legal parents.

Under Irish law, the birth mother is recognised as the legal mother, and surrogacy arrangements are not recognised.

However he said that any such proposal would “take time”. He said the Government was at “an advanced stage” in preparing guidelines as to how surrogacy issues should be handled. Earlier this month, Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore said that the Government was in the middle of looking at legislation on surrogacy.

In 2005, the CAHR recommended that in surrogacy arrangements, the commissioning parents be deemed to be the legal parents. However, one of the members of the commission, Christine O’Rourke, expressed dissent about this recommendation, saying that “the risks of exploitation and commodifcation” accompanying surrogacy outweighed its benefits.

Ms O’Rourke, Advisory Counsel to the Attorney General at the time, expressing her dissent in the CAHR’s report, recommended instead that surrogacy be prohibited.

She said that there was “a broad cultural consensus that a woman who has just given birth may be uniquely vulnerable and the removal of her baby against her will is repugnant, unless she poses a threat of immediate harm to the child”.

She added: “This social norm is reflected in Article 10(2) of the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which obliges Contracting States to accord special protection to women who have just given birth.”

A lawyer for one Irish couple who had a surrogate child in the US three years ago and have not been recognised as the child’s parents has said they are considering taking Ireland to the European Court of Human Rights.

Ms Anne-Marie Hutchinson, said the couple appeared to have good grounds to take a case to Europe. “The key issue is, has Ireland done enough to protect this couple’s right to family life,” Ms Hutchinson said. “You can’t just turn a blind eye to surrogacy. You can make provision for it in law, or make it illegal, but you can’t ignore it.

Austria, Germany and Italy, among other countries, ban the use of donated eggs because they believe it is wrong to split motherhood between a biological mother (that is a surrogate mother), a genetic mother (that is the egg donor), and even a social mother (that is someone who is neither the surrogate mother nor the genetic mother but who raises the child).

Austrian law seeks to ensure that medically assisted procreation takes place similarly to natural procreation, and that the basic principle of civil law, that it is always clear who the mother is, should be maintained by avoiding the possibility that two persons could claim to be the biological mother.

A recent ruling by the European Court of Human Rights held that Austria, in maintaining this principle, was not in breach of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Mr Shatter, meanwhile, laid the blame for the lack of legislation in this area at the door of previous governments and insisted the current administration was committed to putting legislation in place.

“This is a complex area which other countries have addressed, and it’s an issue which successive predecessor governments have chosen to ignore,” he said. “We hope to develop legislation in 2012 . . . but it’s not a straightforward issue and it’s important that people understand the legal issues facing them before embarking on surrogacy arrangements.”