Lorraine Clifford-Lee (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is very welcome. He and my colleagues will not find it any surprise that I will raise the issue of the family law court complex that was promised for a long number of years to be delivered at Hammond Lane. I have spoken about this ad nauseamsince my election to this House back in 2016. I was very happy to see it included in the programme for Government that this site would at last be developed and a fit-for-purpose combined family law court complex would be delivered at Hammond Lane. What is currently in place is not fit for purpose at all. Down through the years I have tabled many Commencement matters on this, most recently this time last year. I was promised by the Minister for Justice that everything was on track and would be delivered within the lifetime of this Government. I was absolutely heartbroken to hear in the middle of August, when we were all on our holidays, that this bad piece of news was slipped out and that actually it was not going to be delivered and nothing would be done during the lifetime of the Government.

Projects relating to Clonmel and Mallow Garda stations, which had been in a bundle with the Hammond Lane project, had been decoupled and are going ahead. We were not given any information about what the holdup was, what the timeline was for delivery or even what the timeline was of knowledge within the Department or why we were not informed. We still have not received a formal statement on it from the Minister for Justice. I am very disappointed the Minister is not in the Chamber to answer that directly because I believe the knowledge lies within her on that. One can talk ad nauseamabout having better laws, helping victims of domestic violence and homicides and building more refuges but all of that is for nothing if we do not have a Courts Service where people can apply for a barring order or a safety order, or if practitioners working on these very difficult cases cannot operate in a safe and suitable environment, or if people are so nervous about bringing an application because they must stand cheek by jowl with the perpetrator of the crime. We can talk about doing stuff on this forever but if we are actually failing to deliver this family law court complex we can forget about it because the situation is getting worse, especially for women and their children. I am very disappointed the Minister has not issued a statement on the matter, despite me calling on her to do so. This bit of information was slipped out thinking none of us would notice. I am very disappointed she is not here to answer for it and show the people who use the District Court and the circuit family courts in Dublin city the courtesy of information on this. Perhaps the Minister of State might be able to answer my query.

All my speaking time is gone. I had a number of other issues to raise about transport police and on recruiting gardaí with sufficient Irish to police Gaeltacht communities but I will leave it at that because plenty of other people have issues to raise on this very important motion.