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Birth Cert via Shutterstock

After naming, will the government make paternity testing mandatory?

The question comes in light of new laws that make naming the father mandatory.

THE GOVERNMENT HAS no plans to make paternity testing mandatory.

In light of a proposed new law that will make the naming of fathers on birth certificates mandatory, Tánaiste Joan Burton told the Dáil she would not be requiring the tests.

The Civil Registration (Amendment) Bill 2014 was published by Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection Burton after Cabinet approval earlier this month.

Last week, she told the Dáil that the purpose of the bill was to protect the rights of the child. However, she told Fine Gael’s Brendan Griffin, that mandatory paternity testing was not part of that plan.

“The fundamental objective of the provision is to ensure that a father’s details are included in the record of the child’s birth. This will underpin the rights of the child under EU legislation to have access to the details of their identity.

“It is not intended to introduce mandatory paternity testing for registration of on birth certificates.”

Current legislation does not require the father’s name to be provided at the time of registering the birth.

The Bill would make it compulsory for this information to be provided. Provisions are made in the Bill for not providing the father’s name in exceptional circumstances.

Read: New law would make it complusory for fathers’ names to be included on birth certs

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41 Comments
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    Mute Jed I. Knight
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    Feb 5th 2014, 7:38 PM

    I’m guessing their target audience isn’t rural Ireland???

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    Mute Ina Smidiríní
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    Feb 6th 2014, 1:24 AM

    No they would be talking about places like Africa I presume.

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    Mute SuperFry
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    Feb 5th 2014, 7:47 PM

    Great another reason for people to think I’ll email them back immediately.

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    Mute Gobblor
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    Feb 5th 2014, 8:10 PM

    End world hunger? No! Wifi for all!

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    Mute PerkyBeans
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    Feb 5th 2014, 9:50 PM

    You can download food,
    Torrent a bag of spuds

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    Mute Drew Clarke
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    Feb 5th 2014, 8:31 PM

    please hurry up. I’m being charged e80 a month by onwave for a 20mb connection and I rarely get above 1.5mb. In fact my upload speed is 4 times faster than my download speed 9 times out of ten.

    Someone needs to do an expose on satellite broadband speeds in Ireland. It’s a rip off and needs to be exposed.

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    Mute John Horan
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    Feb 5th 2014, 8:10 PM

    One way, so more like aertel then actual internet then.

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    Mute SuperFry
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    Feb 5th 2014, 8:12 PM

    WAP is back!!

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    Mute John Horan
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    Feb 5th 2014, 10:11 PM

    WAP was still two way. This, like aertel, is one way, so you would receive all the possible pages in one small subset of the internet and hopefully whatever page you want to look at is contained in there.

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    Mute family guy
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    Feb 5th 2014, 8:03 PM

    The mother in laws house has very bad mobile and broadband coverage. Nice to go out there and forget about the phone for a while. This might put an end to this.

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    Mute Gobblor
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    Feb 5th 2014, 9:11 PM

    Or you could just turn it off? DUH!

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    Mute John Swan
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    Feb 5th 2014, 9:38 PM

    What’ll happen to all those fiber optic cables being put in all over the country then? Also, hate to be a stickler about this, but what about the EMF/radiation exposure this would cause? The health implications would really need to be thoroughly and independently investigated.

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    Mute Gabrielle Humphreys
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    Feb 7th 2014, 10:04 PM

    What do you mean John, can you explain to me a wee bit more, gay

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    Mute Alien8
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    Feb 5th 2014, 9:15 PM

    Minimum orbit is 300km, max wifi usually 30m (Max theoretical TDMA range is around 15km). I get the feeling this is an investor trick, but they’ll have to come up with new ideas. Also transmitters for 2 way are over a metre in size for rubbish internet – even Niall Quinn couldn’t sell you that.

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    Mute Daniel Rea
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    Feb 5th 2014, 8:38 PM

    Well if the scientists are right there’ll be no bees left and say goodbye to fertile men

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