Compulsory blood tests should be introduced for couples getting married to ensure they are not related, a Government TD told the Dail. Mr Ben Briscoe (FF, Dublin South Central) also said the background of people engaged in family counselling should be investigated so that no "menhaters or women-haters" are involved.
"We have both sets of these people in our community, and that goes for the judges as well," he said. "It is terribly important that the people who are doing the counselling are from stable backgrounds who have no hang-ups, one way or the other."
He was speaking during the second stage of the 1997 Children Bill which updates the law on guardianship, custody and access. The Bill also introduces a "charter for children" to safeguard their interests, and allows for the admissibility of children's evidence in civil courts.
Mr Briscoe called on the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr O'Donoghue, to consider legislation making blood tests compulsory "because we have so many single parents that many people meeting in small towns throughout the country don't know whether they're meeting their half-brother or half-sister".
DNA testing would make it easy enough to see whether people were related, he said. "That is going to be a real big problem down the road if we don't deal with it now."
There has been compulsory blood testing in the US for years and if people "have HIV or anything else the person they are getting married to is entitled to know".
He said that family counselling was integral to the success of the Children Bill and "we must ensure that family counsellors have wisdom, and we have to have people who are counselling who are from stable backgrounds."
He believed that married people rather than single people should be involved in counselling, and particularly those with families because they had a lot of understanding.
"We don't want people who have chips on their shoulders, and my fear is that sometimes you get social workers who believe they have a monopoly on truth, and in my view no section of the community has a monopoly on truth or wisdom."
Earlier in the debate Ms Liz McManus (DL, Wicklow) called for unmarried fathers to have automatic joint custody of children "unless there are strong and compelling reasons to the contrary".
She said the Bill recognised the changing nature of families by providing that unmarried fathers no longer need to resort to court in order to seek guardianship or custody of their children. However, they would still "not be automatically accorded joint custody or guardianship". For too long, in legal terms, fatherhood had been defined in terms of marriage and not in terms of parentage, she added.
The Minister said that granting automatic right of guardianship to an unmarried father was "not as clear-cut as it seems". There was a lot of criticism of preference being given to mothers in cases where fathers went to court for custody.
He pointed out that 12,500 children were born last year to unmarried couples. In that year there were 700 applications to court by fathers to have joint guardianship and it was granted in 90 per cent of cases. In 1996 the State dealt with 114 cases of abductions of children by a parent, he said. Of that figure, 51 were abductions into the State and 63 from the State.
The Minister confirmed he would be introducing a Child Pornography Bill to protect children from abuse, and there would be new offences dealing with the abduction and trafficking of children. He said he would be issuing a discussion document on sexual offences, including dealing with a register of sexual offenders.
The Children Bill passed the second stage and goes to committee stage next Tuesday.