Conor Pendergrast grew up in a happy home with parents who idolise him. He has never met his father. The only thing he knows is that his name is Bob and that is all he wants to know. From the moment he was born, he's been showered with love by the two people he considers his parents. Since the day he learned to speak, he has called both of them Mum. It would be inconceivable for him to think of them as anything but that.

But as the child of a lesbian couple, in Irish law, Conor is an awkward anomaly, a curious outcast whose existence legislators have chosen to sweep under the carpet and leave in a legal limbo. In the coming months, the new Civil Partnership Bill will go before the Houses of the Oireachtas and is expected to be law within a year.

For the first time, same-sex couples will be recognised by the constitution, giving them greater rights and provision for pensions, inheritance and tax allowances. But what will not be recognised is the rights of their children, young men like Conor who have been raised in single-sex households but who are sidelined from Irish society because their parents are gay.

Twenty-two years ago, Bernadette Manning from Dublin's inner city, and her New Zealander girlfriend Ann Pendergrast decided to become parents. They had been in a relationship for four years.

At the time, they were living in a gay community in London and many of their friends were taking the same path. They felt the moment was right for them too. "We met when we were 24, and a few years later made a decision to have a family," says Bernadette, a social worker who runs her own social care company.

"A friend of a friend gave Ann the sperm. It was quite a new thing in London at the time but she's a nurse and very pragmatic. The donor went into the bathroom and passed her the sperm out the door. She put it into a syringe and into her vagina and got pregnant straight away. It was as simple as that."

Nine months later, a beautiful baby boy arrived. Conor became the centre of their lives. Two years later, Ann conceived again with sperm from a different man, and their second son, Daragh, was born. With their family complete, the women decided to move back to Ireland in 1995. They bought a house in Clane, Co Kildare and registered the boys in a local school.

Returning from cosmopolitan London to a small community in rural Ireland, they feared the boys might be subjected to homophobic bullying and braced themselves for funny looks and unkind words. But something rather different happened. "We were quite careful when we came back," recalls Bernadette.

"In London, despite its liberal appearance, the boys had been subjected to prejudice. Some of their friends weren't allowed to come to our house because their parents didn't want them staying in a house of gay people. They had a couple of friends who were never allowed to stay overnight.

"When we came back to Ireland, we quite deliberately projected ourselves as a safe, but kind of eccentric, well-off couple. We were very upfront about our family and never shirked away from the fact that we were lesbian parents.

"The children were very open about it too. They would call both of us Mum. They used to tell their school friends they had two Mums and their friends would get jealous because they wanted two mums as well.

"And do you know what? We never experienced any negativity. Ann is an acupuncturist and runs a shop in the local village and there was never any problem at all. Once we had a religious maniac in giving out about us doing reiki in the shop, claiming it was the devil's work -- but that was the height of it.

"If anything, we had the opposite effect. Children whose own parents were not in perfect situations befriended our kids. Even their parents wanted to be our friends -- people who were divorced and weren't saying anything about it, or people who had unusual things in their families like a gay brother or whatever. Suddenly they came out of the woodwork. There was something about our honesty that enabled them to echo what they were hiding." But while the family was widely welcomed in their Kildare village, Ann had lingering fears about their legal status and what might happen to the children if anything happened to her.

Those anxieties remain with her today in the absence of legislation giving her children the same rights as those brought up in heterosexual families. "The situation was the same then as it is now," she says. "If anything happened to me when the children were young, Bernadette would have absolutely no say or rights over them because there is no biological link even though she was just as much a mother to them as I was.

"Thank God, I never got ill or died when the kids were under 18 but as a parent, you always worry that something is going to happen to you. If you know there is another parent who will bring them up the way you would want, then you have that comfort but in our case there was always that uncertainty and worry."

Today, the Pendergrast family are considering leaving Ireland and moving to New Zealand to regularise their status as a family. Bernadette would like to leave her estate, including her thriving company, to Conor and Daragh, but under Irish law, they are deemed strangers and would be subject to significant inheritance tax and other penalties. "I have raised these children with Ann since birth," says Bernadette.

"We have been a family for 28 years but because we are not heterosexual, they have no right to inherit anything from me without facing huge taxes. If we were straight, I could adopt them but there is no access in law for that purely because we are a lesbian couple which is grossly unfair to the children. We don't want to leave Ireland but we feel we are left with no choice."

Although their story may not be a statistically significant sample, the Pendergrasts represent a small but growing number of Irish families who are raising children in same-sex households. They dismiss claims that households like theirs have a corrosive effect on the traditional institution of the family and have no regrets that the boys have never met their fathers.

"We did get agreement from the donors that they would be available to the children when they reached 16 to give them information about their background," says Bernadette.

"But neither child has shown any interest in pursuing them. We never had any further contact from the men.

"They don't even know that the children were born. I don't think the boys have lost out in any way by not having a father. Between the two of us, we have a broad range of skills and interests that go across both genders. The most important thing for children is that they have loving parents.

"Irish society is no longer made up of families with Mum, Dad and 2.4 children. A huge amount of people are living outside the nuclear family, and I reckon families like ours are in that majority. We're just as normal and ordinary as everyone else."

- Gemma O'Doherty