Dr. Geoffrey Shannon:

It came to the realisation that the best way of achieving this was along the lines of what has been suggested in terms of therapeutic intervention at an early stage and engaging with parents. Short of that, there is no quick-fix solution. The child maintenance agency is a step forward. I will completely connect with a point articulated by Senator Ruane that maintenance is in the here and now, particularly for lone parents. The Law Society can elaborate on how that might be achieved. We could provide a supplemental submission on this idea of creating a fund. We need to be creative in our thinking. That point around what happens to those who are at the margins resonated with me.

The cases we are talking about this afternoon are those parents – and children affected by the decisions of parents – who access our District Court, which is a very local court, on a daily basis. How do we help them out? The child maintenance agency would be a game-changer, but it needs to supplemented by other systems, as the point raised by Deputy Carroll MacNeill.

The other systems would be that idea of the maintenance fund and then additional sanctions. What we need to do is provide for all contingencies, and the additional sanctions would be sanctions that do not involve criminalising a parent. Sending a parent to prison is counterproductive. It is about how we provide more effective provisions.

I will finish with a case in point. We have not talked a lot of about access and the breach of access orders, which is a very serious problem. In the Children and Family Relationships Act 2015, there were new and innovative sanctions for dealing with those who refused to facilitate access. Anecdotally, it would appear that those sanctions are not being utilised so we need to use the legislation that we have currently in place. The society is currently undertaking research across all of the District Court areas to look at how that Act is operating, and we are quite happy to feed that research into the committee. What we are hearing anecdotally is that the provisions that were created to ensure access is not breached are not being used to the maximum, and that needs to happen. I hope that has been helpful.