Mr. Philip O'Leary:

I thank Deputy O'Brien for his kind wishes. It is nice to speak to a fellow northsider from Cork. I agree with the Deputy on the point about income thresholds. The cliff-edge effect is unsatisfactory. I hope we will be able to alleviate it with a proposal to increase the thresholds and perhaps have an increased contribution at the higher level. In that way, at least people would still qualify and we would not have the effect of all duck or no dinner.

Deputy O'Brien referred to the family mediation service. That is an important part of the work of the board. The board took over the family mediation services five years ago. Considerable work has gone into integrating both services. I referred to the Jervis Street co-located office that opened recently. My view and the view of the board is that the more cases we can keep out of court and keep within mediation, the better. This brings better outcomes for the parties involved and is less adversarial. An agreement is more likely to stick in the long term than a court-enforced judgment, no matter how well intentioned. I examined the statistics recently. In cases where people attend mediation and both parties engage, we are getting up to a 50% success rate in terms of a mediated agreement. That is a positive and impressive statistic and one we can maintain. New schemes are being operated including in Cork, Athlone and Castlebar. These are termed mandatory information schemes. This means if a person wants to get a legal aid scheme to go to court, then he has to attend a mandatory information session first. I am not suggesting we are forcing people to go the mediation route but we are giving them the opportunity and the information that is necessary for them to engage in that route. From a holistic view of the court services and access to justice, mediation is an area where there could be significant improvement in the sense of the way we have managed society and access to justice.