I am very glad we are having this debate this evening. I pay tribute to Deputy Rice and, indeed, all our fellow members of the health committee in quite an unorthodox way of keeping the heat and light on this issue. There are ultimately a very small number of families affected by this but the impact of the lack of a comprehensive legislative framework has a profound impact on their lives. They are facing into yet another year of ambiguity and uncertainty in their families' lives. I am painfully conscious that there are many types of families watching this evening. Many types of families end up having to go down the donor assisted route, obviously, both in terms of gay and lesbian couples and also couples who cannot get pregnant due to either illness or infertility. There is a very diverse group of people out there. I know a group of campaigners who have come together, and I want to pay tribute to their tenacity and perseverance. Theirs has been a very long journey in terms of fighting and battling for what should be a legal right for every child born in this country to have both their parents recognised. The year 2024 was obviously a major milestone in terms of the passing of the legislation. I want to single out in particular my then fellow Senator, Mary Seery Kearney, whom Deputy O'Gorman also mentioned and who worked so hard in this area. Politics can obviously be a cruel business and she is not in the House this term but she did a huge amount of work in that area. We have major gaps in the 2024 legislation that need to be resolved. In response to the gaps in the Child and Family Relationships Act 2015, my colleague and party leader, Deputy Ivana Bacik, brought forward legislation in 2023, effectively attempting to address a lot of the gaps we are talking about today and to try to make right the legal inequality for the families we are talking about. It is not just about a child’s right to citizenship or inheritance; it is also about his or her right to travel and, of course, his or her rights in the event of parental separation or death. It is critical the Department gets a move on in drafting the legislation. I hear what the Minister of State is saying and I thank her for her statement this evening. First, I acknowledge that it is good to hear that the Minister, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, will commence section 232 of the 2024 Act. We would like to see that done sooner rather than later. We have yet to hear a timeline as to when this legislation is going to be brought forward, however. I was rereading this afternoon a letter that was sent to the Chair of the committee, Deputy Rice, in June 2025 in which the Minister talked about the drafting being well under way. We are now six months on and we still have yet to see it. No one is doubting the complexity of what we are talking about in this regard. We are all extremely conscious of the complexity but that is not an excuse for delay. Certainly, in the context of some of the 18 recommendations in our report, recommendation Nos. 2 and 3 in particular, ultimately, this has to be based on a child’s rights-based framework. Part and parcel of that is the paramountcy of the child's best interest. In tandem with that, there is a strong view that we have to afford discretion to AHRRA with regard to the surrogacy agreements that are out there now. I hear what the Minister of State is saying with regard to the real concerns about women who provide surrogacy services. There are real concerns about exploitation and all of that and I absolutely stand with the Minister of State in that regard. That cannot become a blockage to looking at the rights of the child, however. At the end of the day, if a child is born, then we have to put aside how the child came into being and focus on the rights of the child. That is why the discretion piece is important, notwithstanding that all sorts of safeguards have to be put in place. That is certainly one of our key asks when it comes to what should be in this Bill. Of course, family life is not straightforward or linear. Couples or, indeed, individuals go down the donor-assisted route and then there may be a family breakdown. In that context, it is important that procedures are in place to be able to recognise that. At the end of the day, if the legal recognition is only with one parent, then we have a grossly unequal situation for the whole family, not just for the parents. The 18 recommendations already have been discussed so I will not repeat them. There is a sense of impatience among the number of families out there who need this legislation. We need to hear the timeline. We want to be able to scrutinise that Bill. I am sure the Oireachtas Committee on Health will do everything it can to make way for that Bill through our committee. At the end of the day, we cannot allow these families to remain in legal limbo this time next year. I hope the Department is doing all in its power to ensure that, in the first quarter of next year, we will have something tangible in our hands because at the moment we are talking about the abstract. We are just talking about our recommendations as a committee but, in some ways, they are not worth the paper they are written on until we see what is going to come back from the Department of Health. I hope that, sooner rather than later, we will see something from the Department. I pay tribute to all the families watching tonight and all those campaigners. I hope their fight and journey will be completed early next year and that they will have certainty with regard to their family life.

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