The Children and Family Relationships Bill, which is due to be published next week, has been the subject of intensive work at political and official level for the past five months but the process has been under way for several years.

The Bill which, among other things, will provide for adoption by same-sex couples, is regarded by Government and Opposition parties as an essential component of the campaign to persuade the electorate to vote for same-sex marriage.

Work on aspects of the Bill began as long ago as March 2000 when then minister for health and children Micheál Martin established the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction.

In 2009 the Law Reform Commission began an examination of all the legal issues surrounding guardianship particularly relating the rights of fathers.

In November 2012 former minister for justice Alan Shatter announced he was going to draft the heads of a bill and in January 2014 the general scheme of a Children and Family Relationships Bill was published.

The heads of the Bill were then subject to detailed scrutiny by the Oireachtas Justice Committee chaired by David Stanton. Interested parties were invited to offer their views and suggest amendments.

The committee considered 38 written submissions on various aspects of the legislation and held public hearings on April 9th of last year at which 14 interested groups gave evidence.

On May 8th Frances Fitzgerald replaced Alan Shatter as minister for justice and on September 23rd she secured Government approval to send the revised heads of Bill for drafting and those heads were published on September 26th.

At that stage, Ms Fitzgerald announced the provisions on surrogacy would no longer be included but would form part of a separate piece of legislation to be brought forward by the Department of Health.

The Bill is now complete and the Minister briefed all of the political parties on its contents in recent days. It will be published next week and is expected to be taken in the Dáil in the coming weeks.

A number of important changes and additions have been made to the original heads of Bill published last year.

One of them is the establishment of a mandatory donor-conceived person register. This is designed to allow a child conceived by a donor and born through assisted reproduction to trace his or her identity.

Anonymous donations

Hospitals and clinics will be required to provide details of donors and of donor-conceived children born through assisted reproduction.

Anonymous donations will be prohibited.

Another important change is that eligibility to adopt jointly has been extended to cohabiting couples, living together for more than three years. The proposal already in the draft Bill allowing civil partners to be eligible jointly to adopt a child has been retained.

Another provision will make it easier for an unmarried father to become a guardian automatically. The previous proposal required him to cohabit with the child’s mother for 12 months prior to the child’s birth.

The new requirement will enable an unmarried father to become a guardian automatically once he cohabits with the child’s mother for 12 months, including three months following the child’s birth.

The Bill will also make it easier for grandparents to get access to children when relationships between parents break down.

Provisions on non-parent guardianship have been modified so that step-parents and a parent’s cohabiting partner will be able to apply to become a child’s guardian if she/he has shared caring responsibilities for the child for more than two years.

This guardianship will generally be limited to day-to-day decisions so as to safeguard the rights of a parent who is also a guardian to take strategic decisions on issues such as a child’s residence, religion or education.

Provisions on making parenting orders work have been refined so that if a parent consistently violates a custody or access order, she or he may be required to attend a post-separation parenting programme, give the other parent compensatory time with the child or refund the other parent for expenses incurred.