I recently acted for a father, who had not seen his three young children for six months. He was trying to establish access with them. It was absolutely clear that he had the best interests of his children at heart and the reason why he had not seen them was because he had had a falling out with the mother, who was alleging that he was poisoning the children’s minds against their mother. Try as I might, I could not get any evidence of what exactly was said or done to constitute this “poisoning” allegation. When he was represented by his previous solicitor, my client had lost all access to his children and he says he was very unhappy with his legal representation.
I brought the matter back to court and sought access. The main point of this blog however is to comment on the attitude of the Legal Aid Board, who represented the mother. My client knew that re-establishing access would be difficult and would be met with opposition by the mother and therefore we limited our access request to 4 hours a week on Saturdays. We were met with a counter proposal being 1 hour per week on Saturday supervised by a family member and the mother.
I advised my client that he should let a judge decide whether or not this was a reasonable offer of access as I was very firmly of the view that it was not. He was literally terrified that if the case went to a hearing before a judge, he would never see his children again and ultimately he accepted the one-hour offer.
The Legal Aid Board’s job is to represent their clients but like everybody else, they -particularly as a State body – know that all family law cases are supposed to be determined based on the best interest of the child. I have been doing family law cases for 25 years and I think at this stage I know when a father is genuinely committed to his children or not. In this case my client was clearly committed to his children but legal representatives felt that one hour a week with their father represented the best interests of the children.
If ever there was a reason why family law should be kept out of the hands of the majority of lawyers, this is it. I cannot say stay away from lawyers but I will say carefully assess the legal advice you are getting and before you decide to go with a particular solicitor, make absolutely sure that that solicitor genuinely believes that family law cases should be determined by what is felt to be the best interest of the children.