Dr. Finbar Markey:

I will let Michelle take the most of this but I just want to make a point. There was a book written in the early 1980s by a guy called Lipsky. It was called Street-Level Bureaucracy. It is a fundamental reading piece for anybody who wants to study organisations. He looked at judges, members of the police departments in the United States and other administrative or civil service roles. He found that with judges, just like with everybody else, they do not even look at their cases. They are just put in front of them. They do not give it any detail because they have 200 cases to deal with over the next week. They do not go into any real detail about it and they always err on the side of officialdom. Officialdom always has the money to present its case through top solicitors, etc. For instance, there is the number of mothers who cannot even appeal a decision. They do not have the money to appeal it and cannot get anybody to take the case on, even though it could be a glaring injustice. The judges, to a degree, have their hands tied with time like everybody else with everything else, but it takes a judge, like anybody else, to understand we are dealing with human lives here. We are dealing with lives that have not yet been destroyed. If you get a guy who is 50 years old, who has been robbing shops since he was 20, and who has a drug addiction for the past 30 years, you might say to yourself there is no fixing that man to a degree. He is going to be up again. However, these are babies - just little babies - who have their whole lives ahead of them. That decision the judge makes in this day is so important. It is so important that, when you hear a mother is not speaking up, ask "Why not?" I will let Michelle in.