ARC Mediation welcomes the launch of the Child Maintenance Guidelines by Minister Jim O’Callaghan today at the Family Justice Development Forum hosted by the Minister in Dublin. The guidelines emerged as a recommendation of the Dept of Social Protection Child Maintenance Group, which ARC founder Dr. Roisin O’Shea served on, and co-founder Shane Dempsey made several submissions to.
ARC’s Partners have had a keen interest in the development of such guidelines since they visited the Canadian Family Court and Court-annexed Mediation service in 2010, and discovered the work of Professor Carol Rogerson of UoT on Child Maintenance Guidelines. ARC had only been formed a few months prior but we had big ambitions both as mediators and to lobby for change in family law in Ireland.
Attending at the Forum, Dr O’Shea congratulated the Minister and his Department on launching the much needed child maintenance guidelines;
“Our courts currently operate without any system of guidelines in the determination of child maintenance, dealing with each matter on a case by case basis. It would be of significant assistance to parents and the courts to have a clear indication of the amount of child maintenance payable. The case is well made internationally in terms of diverting people away from the courts to agree on their own family based arrangement with the assistance of mediators, without State intervention, or where private agreements cannot be reached child maintenance guidelines can be administered by the courts which will bring consistency of outcome and certainty to those who need child maintenance and those who pay child maintenance.
In 2019 my colleague Shane Dempsey and I were invited to meet with then Minister Regina Doherty to discuss a submission Shane drafted about establishing child maintenance guidelines in Ireland, providing an analysis of the operation of such guidelines in Canada. The Minister subsequently appointed me to the Child Maintenance Group 2020-2022 chaired by Judge Catherine Murphy, and in the final Report from that Group a majority recommended that a formula to calculate child maintenance be developed.”
In launching the Child Maintenance Guidelines today the Minister is also furthering a recommendation of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice & Equality 2019; that parties should be advised that from the outset that they would try and reach their own agreement and not persist with the adversarial process to avoid exposure to stress, cost, lost time and risk. The Minister emphasised the importance of promoting the use of mediation and noted that this is a guiding principle of the Family Courts Act 2024.
Without maintenance guidelines the outcome in Court is uncertain and therefore may be worth pursuing where a litigant believes a Court would order more or a litigant believes the Court would order less. With child maintenance guidelines we are likely to follow the significant progress made in Northern Ireland where the operation of a child support maintenance framework, including a calculator, has deterred litigation, such that child maintenance is rarely litigated.
Dr O’Shea added:
“With the assistance of mediators, parents can now use the Child Maintenance Guidelines released today and the soon to be released On-line Child Maintenance Calculator to reach private agreement. This is a game changer for families in Ireland and the members of the IPMO look forward to assisting families to quickly reach financial arrangements in relation to their children.”
Photo L to R: Minister for Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, Jim O’Callaghan T.D and Dr Róisín O’Shea Chair of the IPMO