UTV Ireland: Mothers and Fathers Matter launch ‘no’ campaign

http://utv.ie/News/2015/04/17/Mothers-and-Fathers-Matter-launch-no-campaign-35629
17 Apr 2015

Video transcript:

Mary Regan: 5 weeks from polling and the No side are giving voters something to chew on. The country's youngest campaigners were strolled out today to push for a vote against same-sex marriage. They're part of the Mothers and Fathers Matter group, which is putting children centre-stage of the campaign.

Catriona Curran: But every child should be given the right to be raised by their mother and father . That is their right and that's what we need for society and family and for their happiness to be raised by their own mum and dad where possible.

Ray Kinsella: The first words that a baby says are Mammy and Daddy, and parents wait for those words and they're electric, they mean so much to family and grandparents.

Mary Regan: At a press conference around the corner they presented experts in education and in law. An ecologist gave his views on the scientific basis for marriage between a man and a woman.

Sam Sheperd: And from the perspective of evolutionary biology it's actually the only approach to marriage that makes much sense. Marriage is basically a cultural formulation of a mating pair-bond. It enhances human fitness or the fitness of any species by protecting children, by ensuring mum and dad, the male and female and crucially 50% of identity each are around.

Mary Regan: And they rejected comments from the children's minister James O'Reilly that this referendum is about marriage and not children.

Kate Bopp: Studies have shown teens who have grown up for whatever reason without a father, they're more prone to crime, they've already great presentations of emotional stress, volatile anger in young men and boys, and young women tend to gravitate towards abusive relationships.

Mary Regan: But do they have evidence to back up this claim?

Kate Bopp: You can go online, there's research everywhere that will tell you that young men who grow up without a father or a paternal influence in their lives are statistically more likely to turn to violence and aggression.

Mary Regan: In response to the launch a leading Yes campaigner took to Twitter urging people to share photos showing the diversity of Irish families under the hashtag #familymatters.

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Newscaster: Our political editor Mary Regan, Mary joins us in the studio. Mary, you did ask the question, but you didn't get an answer, lots of claims being made there, but have the got the facts to back it up?

MR: I suppose the nature of any referendum campaign as has been historically proven in this country that a lot of claims are made by both sides of any argument which often address people's fears on various issues and one of the things that they strongly suggested during this press conference was that children who grow up with just one parent - and of course one in four families in this country are one-parent families - they're making claims about the difficulties that these children might face in later years. Now one of the claims they were making is that birth certs after this referendum passes will have Parent 1 and Parent 2, they won't any longer have say Mother and Father. Now I put this to the Dept of Justice this even and they said that birth certs will continue to have the child's mother and father except if the child's parents are the same sex and in that case they will Parent In Lieu of Mother/father. Another claim they're making is that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to die by suicide. Now that's a very strong claim to be making. We asked them what evidence they had to back that up. At first they didn't have any evidence and then they referred to the US Dept of Health Centre. I rang the US Dept of Health Centre and they said that at the moment they're not aware of any data or any information they collect that would relate children to suicide. I asked M&FM to send me the reference to the evidence to back this up and they referred me to a campaign group's literature and that campaign group is called the Fatherless Generation, it's a US campaign group so there's a lot of claims but it's very hard to know where the information is coming from.