A few more thoughts on the new Law Reform Commission document, ‘Legal Aspects of Family Relationships’. As is well known, one in three births now take place outside marriage. What is less well known is that in 20 per cent of those cases the identity of the father is not recorded on the child’s birth cert. 

Since there are 20,000 or so births outside marriage each year, that means 4,000 children are born annually who may never know so much as the name of their father, and the father may not even know that he is a father. 

In its editorial yesterday The Irish Times rightly laments this saying it deprives the child of his or her “full right to an identity.” Quite. However, I can’t help but ask what the leader writer would make of recent developments in the UK, Canada and elsewhere, where two men or two women can be recorded on a birth cert as the parents of the one child, something that is, needless to say, biologically impossible. 

Logically the leader writer should conclude that this also deprives a child of his or her “full right to an identity”, but such are the vagaries and inconsistencies of political correctness who can say? 

What we can say with certainty is that as marriage declines the number of children who are not being raised by their father and who may not even know their father, goes up and up and up. 

Some day The Irish Times will come once again to appreciate the vast importance of marriage and it will stop preaching the gospel of ‘family diversity’. Or am I being naive? 

By the way, we will shortly be publishing a paper on the regulation of the Assisted Human Reproduction industry that will pay close attention to the rights of children conceived via sperm and egg donations. Many of these children are deliberately deprived of their “full right to an identity” with the full backing and cooperation of the law. 

Finally, here are some thoughts by John Waters on the subject of the new LRC document.