Ms Geraldine Kelly:

We do a considerable amount of work with families that are homeless because of separation and other reasons. When we worked through the child-contact centres, one of them was run through an FRC in Quarryvale in Dublin 22. We believe the FRCs are very placed as locations for the child-contact centres because people want them at the weekends and in the evening time when the general work of the FRCs is not happening. Except for very young children, most people do not want the contact centre in the morning time. When we used the Quarryvale facility, it worked very well. There was plenty of space; it was a child-friendly environment and was very accessible. Some FRCs already have the staff who could be trained to work very well in a contact centre. Some of them do not. The staffing varies greatly.

We have spoken to managers of a number of FRCs who are already exploring the idea of their staff training up and offering some level of child-contact centres, including in Monaghan and Donegal. It is a huge issue for families that are homeless because the fathers do not have anywhere to go. Having a child-contact centre is very important because otherwise they are in shopping centres, sitting in McDonald's. Even for a parent who is who is with their child every day of the week, it is a very difficult experience to be in McDonald's for longer than 20 minutes. So having contact in McDonald's for two hours will not work out very well.

Deputy Lisa Chambers spoke about the Christmas contact and mediation. We support the shortening of the period of separation before divorce to two years because we see a heightened conflict. Many people are quite amicable when they first separate, but by the end of the four years the conflict is heightened and it gets worse as time goes on. Shortening that timeframe would suit many more people better.

We often support people with shuttle mediation - because they are in such high conflict having two people in the room at the same time is very difficult. Having different variations of mediation can work really well, but it needs to be very intense mediation every week. More resources are required for mediation. At present, the waiting lists run to four months. When we get the call for mediation, four months is too long because people are already in crisis at that stage. If we say to people, "Agree Christmas now", it will be Easter before they get a mediation appointment, which is too long.

The aim is to keep parents out of court for contact and maintenance issues. They are the two main reasons they are in and out of court all the time. Judges cannot support them with those issues; they are really issues for mediation. We also offer a lot of parent mentoring which really supports people. When we ran the contact centres all of the parents engaged in parent mentoring and counselling which really helped them to explore the impact of the conflict on their children. It challenged them to look at their own couple conflict, try to get past it and to move on with the business of shared parenting. That really helped people to move forward, leave the couple relationship behind and focus on their children.