Ms Margaret Dromey:

Thank you, Chairman. I am sharing the five minutes allocated with my colleague. Thank you for inviting Treoir to make a presentation today. It is a specialist information service for unmarried parents. We have a very long history of working with unmarried parents and we are aware of the issues of concern to them. We welcome many of the provisions in the Bill and they are detailed in our submission which I am sure many members have read.

For the purposes of this presentation I will focus on head 37 which also refers to head 31(3) relating to guardianship for unmarried, cohabiting fathers and also the presumption to paternity. My main focus is guardianship. It is very welcome that under the Bill an unmarried Dad who is living with the mother for a year or longer before the birth would be entitled to guardianship rights for his child. It is really positive and progressive. However, the Bill does not address the issue of how cohabitation will be established and that is an area of concern. I wish to paint a scenario of a couple living together for three years at which point the relationship breaks down and the parties disagree on the length of cohabitation.

He believes he is the father of the child because he was living with the mother a year before the birth and since then, but she is of the view that cohabitation evolved in that they lived together on and off initially and he moved in during the pregnancy; therefore, he is not a guardian. The only option for that father, therefore, is to go to court to establish his guardianship rights. That brings us back to the current situation because there is no improvement in that regard. Treoir is proposing that there be a system of affirming or declaring cohabitation for a year at the point of birth registration to ensure the guardians of that child are clear to everybody. That is the first point.

Second, we are concerned that there is nothing in this Bill to improve the situation of unmarried non-cohabiting fathers. They either get agreement from the mother to become guardians or they go to court. A scenario we deal with in the office every day is where both parents are involved in the child's life. They are co-parenting while living apart. That might continue for five years. The child is very involved with its father and the paternal family but the mother decides she wants to move to New Zealand, Australia or another part of the world. She can leave with her child and the father usually only discovers at that point that he has no legal rights to the child. He believes his name on the birth certificate gives him rights but it does not give him any rights. After five years of the child being involved with the father, a mother may leave the country and she has no obligation to allow that child see the father again. We are hearing those stories every day in the office, and it is very difficult. We believe there should be some improvement for those fathers who are not cohabiting.

At a minimum, at the point of birth, registration information should be given on the fact that the mother is a sole guardian. We recommend that the statutory declaration for guardianship be given to the couple at that point, and they should be told to think about it. To go even further, if a couple is in agreement about joint guardianship they could do it at the point of birth registration. That is our recommendation.