Mr. Keith Walsh:

The people who do this do so in their private capacity, so they are not funded. If one qualifies for legal aid, the Legal Aid Board will pay for the assessor in one's case, so that is slightly different. The difficulty with the regulation is that it caps the total amount payable on a particular section 32-type report, which means that if one charges more than that, one is in breach of the law. This is the real difficulty, that one will be doing something unlawful if one charges for a section 32-type report specified in the regulations. This has a fairly chilling effect on experts.

Regarding the courts structure, the difficulty at present in the courts is that the president of the District Court has no great coercive power over other judges. If one were to get into this, one would probably be straying into constitutional territory as well, but my understanding is that the Department of Justice and Equality has examined this. It is at quite an advanced stage in that there may be potentially a draft Bill on specialist courts. I am sure this committee could liaise with the Department on where it is with this. The Law Society would see it as perhaps between ten and 14 hubs, if one likes, where there would be a Circuit Court and a District Court sitting. We are looking at a family law division, whereby a president of the family law division or a judge would be assigned as - the title probably would not have to be "president", but something else. That person would be in charge of the division in the Circuit Court and the District Court.