Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I agree with everything the Minister has just said about the need to provide the back-up services and to provide a more sophisticated court welfare service, which is practically non-existent in the context of the family law area at the moment.

The whole point of this is to ensure that where people are in contempt of court, imprisonment is not the only remedy available to the court. I am an enthusiast for what we have here, in subsection (4) that the Minister mentioned, the parent counselling, family counselling, all of these provisions, which indeed were in the original provision that the committee dealt with. I have no theological or ideological commitment to the original Bill because my perception was that it could be improved and we wanted to go through a consultative process but I do know that unfortunately with the best will in the world there are a group of parents who will not cooperate with any of these arrangements and the courts are bereft of an alternative then to imprisonment. We need to ensure that parents who behave badly and who could impact, not only on the best interests of their children as children, but on the capacity of their children as adults to have a normal functioning relationship, that the activities of those parents are curtailed, that there is some sanction the courts can utilise. There is no particular reason, for example, a community service sanction in the context of family law needs to be tied in with anyone committing criminal offences. It is just that community service is an alternative in the criminal law area to a sentence of imprisonment. There is no particular reason there could not be a stand-alone provision where a judge dealing with a recalcitrant parent behaving contrary to the best interests of a child could not say, "Well, if you do not go to parental counselling or family counselling and if you do not genuinely co-operate, I have other remedies at my disposal and one of the things you may have to do is go off for a couple of hours or three or four hours every week and do designated community service". That is not the worst of sanctions but it incentivises co-operation and it is not a sanction that renders a parent incapable of continuing to act as a custodial parent, if it is the custodial parent who is misbehaving. I think we have to have an open mind on these things and all I am saying is, and I keep coming back to something I said this morning, we are not inventing the wheel. We are travelling a route that other jurisdictions have travelled in this area some 20 to 25 years ago and have discovered that just doing this is not the solution. This is really valuable and helpful but there must be some alternative sanction if it is not working.