As a strong advocate of fathers rights, I am becoming more and more frustrated by the level of inefficiency in our legal system. I had a client earlier in the week who wanted me to make an application for access to his 3 week old baby (Baby D) – it is his first child and […]
The referendum on same sex marriages received enormous media attention with the electorate coming out in force to cast their votes in an overwhelming victory for the yes campaign. Ireland stood tall and Ireland stood proud on Saturday 23rd of May. As a Family Law solicitor, I need to think of what lies ahead in […]
According to Enda Kenny, the Children and Family Relationships Bill will be “the most important change in family legislation since the foundation of the State”. So what is all the fuss about and what do you need to know? Over the course of the coming weeks, I intend to go through in more detail the […]
While it is often portrayed as such, domestic violence does not always involve a female victim and male abuser. A National Study of Domestic Abuse found that 213,000 Irish women and 88,000 Irish men have been severely abused by a partner at some point in their lives. Yet only 5 per cent of those men […]
‘My kids don’t go back and forth; none of this 50/50 time with the mums and dads. My children live with me; that is it’. This comment, made by Kate Winslet during an interview with Vogue magazine, inspired a controversial Christmas ad campaign by UK rights group Fathers4Justice. Their ad features a picture of Kate […]
Over the years I have often written pieces finishing with the sentence “I wonder could this possibly have happened if this man was a woman”. Here is another one. A woman walks into a District Court and tells the judge that seven years ago, my client had a row with her because he suspected she […]
A man marries a woman. They are both self employed earning the same money. They both decide to work three days week so they can look after their new born son. Prior to the marriage, the man built up a substantial property portfolio in the UK by remortgaging the house that was to become the […]
The following is probably the most regular scenario I come across when acting for fathers of young children. A father (we will call him Stephen) comes in to me and says that his daughter is 3 months old but he separated from her mother (we will call her Anne) and she will not allow him […]
I attended a conference last Monday at which I was told that 90% of all domestic violence was perpetrated by men but that the real figure was probably closer to 95%. This was the position even where domestic violence was described as using emotional abuse, the silent treatment, using coercion and threats, intimidation, using the […]
I recently commented on an article in the Irish Times where Women’s Aid spoke out about the ‘tsunami of cases’ involving women and children being abused by men during access visits. I said that I have been working in family law for nearly 30 years and these statistics in my view are grotesquely distorted. I […]
If you are an unscrupulous Irish mother or for that matter an unscrupulous mother living anywhere in the western world, this is your lucky day! I have an absolutely fail-safe way of ensuring that the man you recently separated from never gets to see his children. It works every time. Take out your pens and […]
Image from tumblr I am in the process of taking over a family law case on behalf of a very unhappy father. He told me that his previous solicitor was not supporting his application to have joint custody of his very young son. He is a self employed man, who has organised his working week […]
