Amendment No. 62, and the other amendments the Minister refers to, basically are deleting the reference to party to a marriage or to the parties to a marriage and is replacing it with the reference simply to a spouse or spouses. That is my understanding of what we are doing.
Looking at those amendments as they stand on their own, there is no particular reason why they could not be accepted. They seem to be fairly straightforward, but I am not sure that that is the case. It seems to me there is an interlinking between these amendments and other sections of the Bill. Accepting these amendments would make complete sense if we were to go on to accept the other amendments the Minister has tabled to most of the sections contained in Part II. I have a problem, and perhaps the Minister could deal with this so that we do not get bogged down unnecessarily at this stage.
The rest of Part II of the Bill in its original form at various places refers to a "party to a marriage" instead of referring to a person as a spouse. They mean the same thing, and it does not greatly matter. The problem is that if we accept the Minister's amendments in section 7 and if we should go on and accept, for example, section 10 of the Bill in its current form, as opposed to accepting the Minister's proposal which would be to delete it and accept a number of other sections, we have a reference to "spouses" in section 7 and a reference to "parties to the marriage" in section 10. There is an interlinking here and that is my only problem with this.
If the Minister had tabled an amendment to change throughout Part II the reference to "party to a marriage or to the parties to a marriage" simply to "spouse" or "spouses", I would immediately accept it and there would be no problem. There does seem to me to be an interlinking and if we accept what appears on the surface to be a simple linguistic amendment to section 7, we are travelling along the road of automatically going on to accepting possibly other amendments the Minister has tabled or creating a degree of inconsistency of approach in the Bill. You would be referring to spouses in section 7 which is one part of Part II and you will be referring to them differently in section 10.
Nevertheless, if the committee takes the view that they want to do that, I would say that we could, of course, take the word "spouses" in this section and if we retain section 10 and other sections, we could on Report Stage change them to refer to "spouses" for consistency. I have no objection to that either. I would like it to be clarified from the Minister's side, that if we accept this amendment we are not going to hear an argument later on in the morning to suggest that because we accepted what appears to be an innocuous amendment to section 7 that we must now go on and accept all the other amendments.
