Dr. Róisín O'Shea:

I am going to keep it tight. I know I am loquacious but I am working on it. The Swedish research centre, CHESS, defines shared parenting as parenting where the non-residential parent has at least 30% of the child's time per week. That is beginning to be an accepted definition of shared parenting. We are a bit data-free at the moment but I will provide a statistic. In the 1,200 cases I observed in the Circuit Court, 1% of children resided with both parents under 50:50 parenting arrangements. That was the equal-parenting time piece.

Most family law cases take place in the District Court and there is no complexity of law there. There is no issue with quantifying maintenance. It is not how one feels about the money, it is a question of the numbers. However, we are number-bereft in the District Court. Parenting should be under guidelines. We should be using structured systems. These are not things that should be argued about and they are not legally complex. Most cases that have those complexities can be dealt with. They are the more rarefied cases. The vast bulk of cases do not have any legal complexity.