Dr. Carol Coulter:

At some point, I would be very happy to speak to the committee or any individual member about this in much more detail because it cannot really be answered in a couple of sentences. The experience of other countries has been that where the media are permitted to attend family law proceedings, which is the case in a large number of countries, there remains very little coverage and no comprehensive coverage of family law proceedings in a balanced way. This is because the media tend to focus on high-profile cases where, if permitted, they can identify the families if they have a particularly high profile or if they are celebrities. The bread and butter family law proceedings, which are what most people experience, never get reported by the media in general. Only a small selection of judgments are published; the vast majority of happenings are not necessarily covered. This relates to the issue of information, which was raised by Treoir. It means information is not readily available. I am happy there is now some international interest. The model has been developed through a series of accidents. A paper on this on our website describes how our project came into being.

It is able not only to publish reports so that cases from the general public are described on a website accessible to everybody but also to collect data that can be the raw material for research to examine trends and developments which we hope will lead to recommendations. As to what further mechanism might be used to ensure that can continue after the end of our project in two years' time and which only deals with child protection, I hope it would be an integral part of legislation providing for a family court in order that transparency could be assured within any new family court. Apart from anything else, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the jurisprudence from that, requires that there be accountability, particularly where the State is involved in family proceedings so that it is not allowed to take action in respect of families without people being aware of what is happening. I would be very happy to go into it in a lot more detail on another occasion with individual members of the committee.