James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Members and visitors are welcome to this afternoon's proceedings. We will call in our witnesses in a moment and I will do the housekeeping, etc., when they are all with us. The witnesses are now welcome to join us.

I welcome our witnesses. The topic before the committee today is the enforcement of court orders relating to child maintenance, access and custody. This is one of our family law topics. The committee takes elective modules and matters of interest to members of the committee every so often. That is the subject of today's hearing. Our guests might raise their hands as I go through the attendance if their names are not on the title bars in front of them. I welcome Ms Louise Bayliss, the co-founder of Single Parents Acting for the Rights of our Kids, SPARK; Ms Karen Kiernan from One Family; Ms Stephanie Whyte, assistant director of children's services at Barnardos; Mr. Damien Peelo, chief executive officer of Treoir; Ms Gayle Smith, information and policy office of Treoir; Mr. Mark Garrett, director general of the Law Society of Ireland; and Dr. Geoffrey Shannon, senior counsel, director of policy at the Law Society of Ireland. All our guests are sitting in the order in which they appear on my list, which is a good start. We are on message and on sequence so far.

I will address a small bit of housekeeping before we get into the matters proper. All our guests are probably familiar with the conduct of hearings here and in similar bodies. However, I will recap on parliamentary privilege. Witnesses and members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect that they should not criticise or make charges against any person, persons or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable, or to engage otherwise in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in respect of an identifiable person or entity, they may be directed to discontinue these remarks. Members will be aware of that. I call on members and witnesses not to defame anybody outside the room. That is the simple way of putting it. I am sure our guests and members are well aware of that but it is important to repeat at the outset.

All of the business performed today will be recorded and broadcast live on the Oireachtas channels. I ask attendees who have mobile phones or other devices to switch them to airplane mode because otherwise they might interfere with the recording and sound system.

The way we conduct our business is to take short opening statements from our witnesses to set the scene. We will come to each of our guests in due course.

They will have three minutes in which to make those opening statements. It is reasonably short but we set that time because it allows for more time later for the to-and-fro, which we find can be more useful. We will then have six minutes for each of our members to put their questions to the witnesses. We will go around the table in the order members indicate and take one member at a time. There is a six-minute slot for that member to ask questions and for the witnesses to respond. It is up to individual members whether they want to have six one-minute engagements or a six-minute monologue. Each member has a mandate so I will not interfere with that. I will, however, move it on after six minutes to the next member who is coming in. If needs be, we will then have a second round of three minutes and so on. Generally, we find that if somebody really wants to respond to an item, it is very likely that it will arise in the following interaction anyway so everybody at the meeting will hopefully have their say across the different interactions. The order in which the opening statements will be taken is the same order in which I introduced the witnesses. For convenience, we have a clock in the corner that we use for housekeeping. The witnesses might keep an eye on that as they are speaking in order that that they can tailor their remarks. We will start with Ms Bayliss from SPARK Campaign Ireland.