Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I fully agree with the amendment the Minister has proposed. It is absurd that somebody who wanted to complain about how they were treated had to get the permission of somebody who they alleged had mistreated them to make a complaint in the judicial complaints process. I fully agree with that.

We should think about this provision and the rule with regard to contempt of court slightly more deeply. I am fully in favour of the allowing of bona fide representatives of the media into family law cases. That was done in 2004 when I was Minister for Justice. It is an important thing to have done. It had the effect, or should have had the effect, of making the process more transparent and dealing with allegations that the system was systematically biased one way or another or that men or women or whatever were getting a raw deal one way or the other.I fully understand the importance of these provisions.

My next point follows from the fact that family law matters are effectively secret. I am conscious of one particular circumstance and other Members may be aware of it too. It was suggested a number of years ago that RTÉ wanted to publish the behaviour of one or more practitioners in family law with regard to the extraction of fees from a client. It was suggested there was an element of getting the spouse of a man, or of a woman, to exercise a charge over the assets that could be recovered in family law proceedings to satisfy that practitioner’s costs. The Supreme Court was later to criticise some of the figures that it became aware were being charged by way of legal fees in family law cases, and some of the sums that were asked by way of a lump sum payment were grossly excessive. RTÉ wanted to publish a documentary to draw to the attention of the public what was being done under the rubric of contempt of court, on the one hand, and non-disclosure, on the other hand, but it was effectively told by court injunction not to even attempt to do so because it could amount to a contempt of court.

Before Report Stage, I would like the Minister to consider a section stating that nothing in this Act or in the law relating to contempt of court prevents bona fide journalism from investigating not merely the amount but the manner in which parties to family law litigation are effectively charged fees, as well as the scale of such fees. On one occasion, a Member of the other House told me of a man who was charged a colossal fee - I think it was €400,000 - in regard to a family law matter. The Deputy told me that when that was challenged and the individual threatened to go public, it suddenly disappeared down to €120,000 because of the threat of adverse publicity. I presume it is a tiny minority doing this but we should not afford them the opportunity to avail of the veil of secrecy in regard to family law matters to attempt to extract vast sums from people and prevent those people from coming forward to say in public what has happened to them. That is wrong. We should qualify the guarantees of non-disclosure to at least make it possible for somebody to go public if they have been hammered for costs as part of the family law process. I do not think there is anything wrong with that principle. If someone ended up being charged €400,000, threatened to go public and then saw the figure changed to €120,000, as I was told happened in that particular case, other people should not be able to avail of the threat of injunctions against broadcasters to cover up that situation.

I do not know exactly how it could be done. However, I believe there are circumstances in which people should have the right to go public about what has happened to them personally without infringing the necessary confidentiality that applies to the actual hearings before a court.

I have a second point which I will deal with under section 98.