The current legislation on maintenance, the Family Law (Maintenance of Spouses and Children) Act 1976 as amended, provides several mechanisms to deal with cases where a person fails to comply with court-ordered maintenance obligations. However, I recognise that enforcement is a challenging issue for those seeking to enforce maintenance orders.
The Deputy may be aware that my Department is leading a programme of family justice reform set out in the first Family Justice Strategy, which I published in November 2022.
On 8 January 2024, I published the Review of the Enforcement of Child Maintenance Order, fulfilling an action contained in Goal One of the Family Justice Strategy, that of ‘supporting children’.
The Review puts forward 26 recommendations focused on generating maximum compliance with child maintenance orders, to ensure security and stability for children and to aid poverty prevention. The recommendations, while mainly focused on strengthening provisions for court enforcement of child maintenance orders, also look at ways to encourage voluntary payment and to assist people to make private arrangements.
The recommendations focus on improving the way in which maintenance is agreed/ordered, the way in which payment is encouraged, the means by which default can be avoided and greater mechanisms for enforcement. The key recommendations of the review include:
• Development of a set of child maintenance guidelines.
• Introduction of mandatory mediation information sessions.
• Strengthening attachment of earnings orders and exploring the possibility of attaching an order to a PPS number rather than employing entities, so that orders do not lapse when there is a change in employer.
• Introduction of a single enforcement procedure when the receiving parent makes an enforcement application, allowing the judge to choose the most appropriate enforcement option based on the circumstances of the case.
• Simplification of the bench warrant process.
• Placing the onus on paying parents to pay costs associated with enforcement proceedings.
• Introducing a data sharing agreement between the Courts Service, Revenue, the Department of Social Welfare and the Department of Agriculture.
• Allowing for deductions from social welfare, the paying parent’s bank accounts, from government grants and subsidies and allowing for the recovery of arrears from tax refunds.
I intend to move these recommendations to implementation without delay, working in cooperation with the Minister for Social Protection and the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.
A copy of the Review is available here: www.gov.ie/en/publication/de4f9-review-of-the-enforcement-of-child-maintenance-orders/ .
