Dr. Clíona Saidléar:

I agree that we have changing family practices and parental practices but we do have data that clearly looks at and measures the level of engagement of mothers and fathers in their children's lives in terms of care and labour. I would expect that the decisions in courts would somewhat reflect that. They would not necessarily absolutely mirror that because we can see that once a family breaks up there might be a change in that pattern in terms of who is doing the primary caring. To echo what Dr. O'Mahony said, is it the case that there are voices being muted? What we are hearing is that all parties are being muted here. We are not hearing from all parties. To build a case and an argument on anecdotes may not be very helpful. What we really need is the quantitative data that will allow us to actually say what we are looking at and have a conversation because we probably need a conversation about this but until we have the data in front of us, we cannot have that conversation.