Mr. Damien Peelo:

Treoir welcomes the opportunity to address the joint committee on the important topic of the enforcement of court orders.

Treoir works with its member organisations to improve the lives of parents who are not married to each other. Our national information service deals with thousands of queries each year from parents, many of which queries are about maintenance. Treoir provides legal information to those parents and their extended families and professionals through its services and by way of nationwide outreach.

We welcome the examination of the maintenance-recovery procedures. We make our submission to this committee in the context of the ongoing work on the reform of the family court system. Each year, Treoir receives thousands of queries about child maintenance from mothers, fathers and extended family members, and our submission is based on their experiences. A majority of calls relate to the interaction of maintenance payments with the one-parent family payment and other benefits and highlight the interaction between social protection, maintenance and lone parents experiencing poverty.

Under current social welfare policy, the onus is on the custodial parent to pursue maintenance on behalf of the child. Where an agreement of maintenance between both parents cannot be reached, payment of child maintenance must be sought through the courts. This can be a daunting and even traumatic experience, especially when there is a history of harassment or domestic violence. Pursuing maintenance through the courts is time-consuming and expensive. One caller to our information line described a 20-year battle in the courts to secure maintenance and arrears from an ex-partner as financial abuse.

Even when a court order is granted, it is not a guarantee that maintenance will be paid. However, once that court order for maintenance is made, the amount is counted as means regardless of whether the maintenance is paid. Consequently, non-payment of maintenance can result in families living on an income lower than their social welfare entitlement. Lone-parent families already experience higher rates of deprivation than two-parent households, so the insecurity of income through the non-payment of child maintenance leaves them particularly vulnerable to poverty and deprivation. In the context of the persistence of child poverty in lone-parent families, Treoir believes certainty in the recovery of child maintenance through a statutory agency will go some way towards alleviating child poverty by providing the income security that lone-parent families need.

Article 27 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child lays out that the state is required to take appropriate measures to secure the recovery of maintenance for the child from parents or other persons having financial responsibility for the child, both within the state party and from abroad.

Parenting alone brings many challenges. Obtaining court orders for maintenance from the non-custodial parent should not be one of them. There needs to be a standardised, fair system of assessment and recovery of child maintenance. Treoir feels the establishment of a State maintenance agency would have a key role in that assessment and recovery maintenance. An immediate benefit would be a reduction in time-consuming and often futile child maintenance cases currently in the court system. Most crucially, the often-arduous task of pursuing child maintenance can be taken out of the hands of the custodial parent, resulting in a higher rate of enforcement of child maintenance being paid in Ireland and, potentially, greater engagement by both parents in their children’s lives.