Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am really interested in the piece between public law and private law. I hear clearly what was said about a public model that does not depend on maintenance being paid. We have discussed before the difficulty with enforcement. The witnesses' baseline is that they would like an ideal scenario in which money is transferred by whatever means. I accept what has been said about the philosophical point, which I had not really thought about until it was phrased in that way. It is interesting because we talk about child poverty but we fail sometimes to connect the language of failing to pay maintenance. I think more people would connect with that language if it were more broadly situated.

Dr. Shannon and Ms Bayliss might respond to the following. Let us say a parent wants to pay maintenance and is reliably paid. That is not the baseline. We have a public model which is the baseline, and maintenance can be paid on top of that.

However, our concern is situations where it is not paid and how we can attach that. What was said about the PPS number is very important. It is important that the liable parent, as it were, pays and it is not just the State. It should not become an acceptable State idea that people can leave their child – or whatever scenario has happened before – and have no financial obligation to care for their child in some way. I do not want to decouple it so much that maintenance ceases to be relevant to it. There are many different ways of considering that, whether that is paid from a court order that is simply then paid to or attached to Revenue and feeds into the Exchequer fund generally and goes to support a different model.

I am interested in what Dr. Shannon said about how far an agency can go. I do not know if he elaborated on that following the Supreme Court and how far an agency can go beyond a court being involved. The biggest difficulty seems to be with access to court and actual enforcement of the different models. We have talked much about maintenance, but enforcement of access is an issue I see again and again in different ways. With an access issue, one should not have to go back to court each time. It makes the issue much bigger than it needs to be when one is trying to have a harmonious life for a child. Can he elaborate on some of those points please?

I want to ask about section 47 and I will do it in the second round.