Dr. Carol Coulter:

I thank the Chairman and other members of the committee. I have been director of the Child Care Law Reporting Project since it was established in 2012. We attend child care proceedings in court, namely the District Court, and then prepare them for publication on the website. In a sense, this is the reporting aspect, or the public accountability and transparency aspect, of our work. In addition, we collect data on the cases. These are analysed and published in annual reports. There have been two interim reports so far and there will be a third drawing together the data over three years. I have full copies of the interim reports for every member. They are also available on the website.
We do not seek information from sources beyond the court proceedings. A lot goes on at the social worker level, which my colleagues will speak about, and we provide a bird's eye or worm's eye of what happens when the process reaches the court. We have 179 case reports on the website. They range from very lengthy and complex cases, where sex abuse or non-accidental injury to a child is alleged, to much more mundane - perhaps that is not the right word - cases that involve the neglect of a child or children.
It is a combination of circumstances that leads to the family coming before the courts. We collect data not only in these cases, on which we report, but also on those that are mentioned perhaps rather briefly or cases many of whose details resemble those of other cases. In the latter case, we do not feel it is necessary to publish the whole thing. However, we fill in forms that allow us to collect data on families, proceedings, whether families are legally represented, the numbers and ages of the children, whether they have special needs, and the kind of care they are going into. That forms the statistical part of the interim report, which the members have. Those who wish to look a little more deeply into this will look at the evidence in the case reports, how it is contested, the role of the guardian ad litem, the intervention of the judge and what the judges might say during the case, in addition to the judge's decision.
Our findings so far have shown up a number of problems with the existing system, including wide variations in the amount and quality of the support given to vulnerable families before court proceedings are initiated. There is a lack of timely access to and co-ordination between the various services that vulnerable families need. For example, people can fall between the cracks of the HSE's child and family service, now Tusla, or the Child and Family Agency, and the Department of Education and Skills when trying to gain access to various kinds of supports. There are variations around the country in the thresholds regarding which orders are sought by the HSE and also granted by judges. Some judges are much more ready to grant an order that is sought while others will interrogate it much more carefully.
There are different types of orders used in different areas and there are different standards in the evidence presented to court. Particularly outside Dublin, there is a problem owing to insufficient time being devoted to cases, and that can lead to frequent adjournments if the cases are very contested. There are cases spread out over many months and repeated renewals of interim care orders while the family is being investigated. That leads to a worsening of relations between families and the Child and Family Agency. My colleague Ms Ceili O'Callaghan will be able to elaborate on that in more detail. What I describe can lead to the whole process becoming extremely adversarial and stressful for everybody.
The main reason the Child and Family Agency seeks an order is neglect of the child. That can be linked to problems the parents have. The overwhelming problem, which is the one that is most common, is poverty. It is important that this be recognised at the outset. Poverty on its own, however, does not lead to families having to face child care proceedings. Very often, there might be a cognitive or mental disability on the part of the parent, or drug or alcohol abuse. Social isolation is very often a feature of families who are vulnerable in this way. Approximately 70% of the parents are single parents parenting alone. Some 10% or so are cohabiting and only 11% involved married families. With regard to the remaining 10%, parents were missing completely in that children had been trafficked or otherwise, or they just did not feature in the proceedings at all.
We found disproportionate numbers of parents from ethnic minorities, including Travellers. We know from international research that people from ethnic minorities tend to be over-represented among the poor and marginalised in various ways. It should not come as such a surprise but it certainly poses challenges for the child care system that I am not sure we have sufficiently paid attention to as a country.
Almost one third of the children have special needs, most commonly psychological problems. Although I say that, I have not carried out any investigation. What we are talking about is evidence of some kind of special need being mentioned in court. It could just be the need for educational support, or it could be a psychological problem. Understandably, the problem could have arisen from emotional neglect. Abuse, including emotional, physical and sexual, is sometimes a feature.
The legislation provides for four types of orders. Emergency care orders last for only eight days, after which the child must be returned or an interim care order must be sought. Interim care orders are issued where there is reasonable cause to believe the child's health, development or welfare is at risk and a care order is being prepared. They are a kind of holding operation until a decision is made about a care order. A care order applies up to when a child is 18, but there is a phrase in the legislation that refers to an order applying to the age of 18 or for such time as the court might decide. In some courts, that has been used to have short-term full care orders for six months or a year. In this case, the HSE will work with the family trying to get things back on track. This mechanism is very commonly used in some of the Munster cities and towns. It works fairly well in some of those cities and towns because it means people are not back before the courts all the time. There is a particular period in which there are jobs to be done by the family, and sometimes by the Child and Family Agency with the children. Otherwise interim care orders must be renewed every 28 days. That requires the Child and Family Agency's social worker, the Child and Family Agency's lawyers, the parents and their lawyers, the guardian ad litemand usually the lawyers of the guardian ad litemto go to court every 28 days to demonstrate that the conditions still exist for maintaining the order.
During this time, parental access to the child is usually supervised. Supervised access is horrendous, in my opinion, although there are social work specialists here who might have different views. Evidence of what happens during supervised access is used in court as part of the ongoing examination of family circumstances. I do not know any parent who could imagine what it would be like to be having meetings with one's children under such conditions. It is very difficult to imagine relations being spontaneous and natural.
The largest category of applications through the District Court is for the extension of interim care orders. They comprise approximately one third of all applications. In some parts of the country, they comprise much more. Three quarters of applications in Clonmel, Drogheda and Dundalk and two thirds of all applications in Dublin were for extensions of existing interim care orders. Reviews of existing care orders accounted for 10% of all hearings but half of all the hearings in Cork.

In Cork they have short-term full-care orders which come back for review and get examined by the judge or mentioned in court, and that explains that distinction. While this can be a very adversarial process it is important to stress that only a minority of cases are contested by parents because about two thirds of the parents acknowledge that they need help. In that one third category only a small minority of cases are rejected by the court, that is, 4%, and in 7% of cases the order was either modified or withdrawn by the Child and Family Agency.

We have published statistics we got from the Courts Service which show that some District Court areas process many more applications than others. Some of the figures I have given in the presentation are on the website. I have been asked why this is the case and I honestly cannot explain it but there are probably various reasons. It is undoubtedly true that different levels of deprivation probably operate in different towns and the Courts Service has no national template for recording applications. There may be discrepancies in the Courts Service's figures. However, that does not account for all of the differences. Where there is a high level of family support services the incidence of child care orders is likely to reduce. The importance of family support services cannot be overemphasised. Even when we play all of this in, the CFA's statistics show that Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Louth, along with four out of the seven Dublin areas, have a higher proportion of children in care than the national average. There are differences around agency practice as well, The wide variations in the thresholds mean that circumstances which might lead to a child being taken into care in one part of the country will not lead to that in another because of different attitudes on the part of some social work teams and some judges to, for example, cannabis use which would not be regarded as serious in many parts of Dublin but would be regarded as very serious in some rural towns. Certainly, there is a lack of consistency and the crucial question which is whether the child is suffering neglect or is at risk is not then the focus. The focus is on the parental behaviour but it should be on whether the child is vulnerable in those circumstances.

The amount of time available is another factor. In Dublin, two judges sit five days a week. A third judge sits two or three days a week dealing with only child care cases and they get very careful attention which is important. The judges involved have been doing it for a few years and have developed a very high level of expertise. However, other District Court judges, and this is through no fault of theirs, deal with civil District Court matters, criminal matters, road traffic accidents, bail applications and child care and family law. There might be one family law day in a town in a month where there would often be 60, 70 or 80 family law cases on the list, including domestic violence, maintenance applications and so on with the child care applications shoehorned somewhere into the list. It is impossible for them to be heard adequately if there is any kind of contest or difficulty about them. Many of them go through with consent and with renewals but it makes it much more difficult outside of Dublin for the cases to be heard properly.

I am not making final recommendations at this stage because there is another year's research to follow before we produce final recommendations, but we have said there are certain things that could be at least looked at immediately. A special family court is essential where there is a dedicated cohort of judges who can specialise in that area and devote a period of time to it. It is not desirable that judges should only hear family law cases and be cut off from the rest of law, both for their sake and the sake of the development of family law, and we would get very few to agree to do that because it is very stressful. I have yet to meet a judge who is not relieved sometimes to have a little stint dealing with criminal and other cases because of the nature of the cases they are hearing. Similar to having, for example, a commercial division of the High Court, we could have a division of these courts. The Department of Justice and Equality is already looking at this because it features in the programme for Government. Other services such as mediation should be available to a family court in order that people can be diverted from court proceedings.

There are certain legal principles that need to be embedded in a reformed Child Care Act, and the role of mediation needs to be explored further. I do not think that mediation would really have a role in a decision about making or not making an order. That is a very straightforward and important decision because we are interfering with constitutional parental rights and it is only right that the court should make such an order. However, there are other ancillary issues that arise around access, assessments, foster placements and so on that could be dealt with much better through mediation. Much more help should be available for social workers to obtain a little more legal knowledge in order that they understand the kinds of thresholds that are required when they go to court and to have support in that respect.

I reiterate that poverty is a major cause of what is defined as neglect. We need to address child poverty and provide early intervention for the families who need it by way of the types of programmes that exist in a rather patchy way but are often the first to disappear when there is pressure on resources. I refer to programmes such as the community mothers scheme and so on, which only require a relatively small amount of investment and yet produce many positive outcomes for families, and they need to receive adequate resourcing and support.