Dr. Ruth Barrington:

I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for the opportunity to present Treoir's view of the reforms that are needed in the family law courts.

Treoir has been in the business of providing a specialist information service to unmarried parents and their children for over 40 years and the issues that we will be bringing to the committee's attention have been raised by the many callers, both on our phone line and to our offices, over the years.

Our aim is to achieve a system where unmarried families are recognised and treated with much greater respect than they are at present. I need not remind the committee that the recent figures show that more than 30% of children or approximately 25,000 children a year are born now to parents who are unmarried. This is a growing population of people whose rights are still very vague.

We have a particular issue in relation to the rights of unmarried fathers to guardianship of their children. We believe that, first, as set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, every child has the right to know who his or her parents, both father and mother, are; and second, has the right also to enjoy the company of both parents. As other speakers have said, if one starts from that position one must take a different view of the interventions that are currently available for unmarried parents and their children.

I would now like to hand over to Mr. Peelo, our CEO, who will elaborate in more detail on some of these points.