Mark Feehily has called for the Irish government to change surrogacy legislation here in Ireland. Speaking with Amy Huberman on her Mamia and Me Podcast he opened up about the road to surrogacy he and his partner Cailean O’Neill went on, which wasn’t always easy.
Speaking about how surrogacy works in Ireland the Westlife singer said; “At the moment in Ireland the legislation is designed around the sort of more traditional heterosexual a man and a woman have a baby, and at the moment families who have children through surrogacy are having to squeeze themselves into the rules and the laws that have been made up for a completely different situation.”
“It’s not an emergency because all the kids are loved and they have loving families and everything but they deserve to be taken care of legally and it’s not there at all and it just needs to speed up because these children are here now,” he added.
Mark and Cailean welcomed their little girl Layla into the world in October 2019 via surrogacy, which was a process that took almost three and a half years and involved a lot of travel.
He shared; “Like put it this way I would love in the future not to have to go to the other side of the world to do what we’ve done.”
The 41-year-old also opened up about how difficult it is for children bron via surrogacy to be recognised in Ireland; “And kids that are born through surrogacy at the moment when they come back to Ireland are having to sort of be fitted into the laws that were made up for a different set of people and I really think it’s important that Ireland, quite quickly seeing as the amount of people that are having children through surrogacy whether they be same-sex parents or not, the children are here, they’re born and they deserve to be recognised.”
The Sligo native also spoke about the lengthy process of becoming parents for them; “I’d be crazy into the research and stuff, before we even began, making phone calls and enquiries, I did so much research.”
“From the day Layla was born to if you go back to the first time I Googled surrogacy for same-sex parents.. .It was about three-and-a-half years.”
“We feel lucky as parents because people come into parenthood in many different ways, for us, especially the fact that we did it through surrogacy,” he added.
