Dr. Róisín O'Shea:

The default access orders of the District Court and the Circuit Court for non-resident parents, who are fathers in 97% of the cases, are every second weekend and one night during the week. When I carried out my Circuit Court research I interviewed 15 of the judges. I asked them where did the orders come from and it took nearly two years for me and these judges to figure it out. What we figured out and learned was that these orders came from expert reports when a welfare issue was raised about a child. Every second weekend and one night during the week was meant to be the least amount of time a non-resident parent would have with his or her child and not the norm. What has happened is that all of our courts order that as the norm. That is impacting on fathers and is a very serious issue. How do we resolve this? We provide parenting guidelines, which is what is done in other countries. There are parenting guidelines in Canada that stipulate children who are under the age of five or six years should not be more than four days away from the other parent - the non-resident parent. There should not be these big blocks of time.

Mediation is now court linked, under the Mediation Act 2017 that came in in January of last year. In other words, if a case rocks up in court and the parties have not tried mediation then under section 16 of the Act a party to the proceedings can ask the judge to ask both of them to consider and to try mediation. We have only just launched our project in Dublin and in the 50 cases that we did, the parenting time for the non-resident parent improved in all cases, and 80% of the fathers in the 50 cases did not have any access at all. We could address the imbalance in parental rights by good, competent mediation linked to our courts because, under section 11 of the Mediation Act, the parties can now determine if a mediated agreement is legally binding and capable of enforcement. Let us say there is a parenting agreement in mediation but somebody breaches it down the road, the case can be brought into the District Court really fast and the agreement enforced. The judge has a really clear picture of a child's life. He or she will know what time the child gets up at, goes to bed at and goes to see Mary at, when the child makes his or her communion and goes on holidays and what things the child does at Christmas, etc. A mediator can map that out carefully and slowly based on the parents of the child but a judge cannot. Of the 375 cases I have done on the District Court, fewer than ten minutes is the full hearing time per case.