FAMILY LAW Courts won’t care who’s to blame

PAST IS PAST Divorce courts will place no emphasis on which spouse was responsible for the breakdown of the marriage.

Who did what won’t matter


Q&A
Brid Manifold

After being separated now for over seven years, my wife has finally agreed to deal with the situation, and I am hoping my divorce case will go to court in the next few months. It has been a very difficult time for me, as my wife has a serious drinking problem and we ended up in a lot of debt. I hope that the court will do the right thing by me.

In our line of work as family lawyers, we are accustomed to clients coming away from the family courts with a bitter taste in their mouths. You may have been the person to keep the body and soul of the family together and feel you deserve to have that recognised. However, you are not likely to get a more favourable result than any other couple going through a divorce in the Irish Courts.
The reality is that in the vast majority of cases, divorce and judicial separation are granted in this country on a ‘no fault’ basis.
This means that, by and large, the court and the judge hearing the case place no emphasis on which of you was responsible for the breakdown of the marriage. The behaviour of either of you will not influence the court is making financial or property orders.
This can be very confusing for people who may have had long meetings with solicitors and barristers outlining a history of neglect or worse by their spouse, and where the written documents, ‘Pleadings’, filed in court may go into great detail on these past transgressions.
Clients naturally place great store by what they read in the formal Pleadings, but unless the behaviour has been ‘gross and obvious’ and very extreme, you will find that when your case is reached for hearing, the courts take a more ‘business-like’ approach to the orders it needs to make.
The factors the courts are legislatively required under the Family Law Acts, to take into consideration when granting a divorce are:

• Whether a legal marriage was entered into
• Whether the couple has been apart for four out of the previous five years
• Whether the marriage has irretrievably broken down
• Whether there is any prospect of reconciliation
• Whether adequate financial provision been made for the children and both spouses

So, while the family law system is adversarial, you can see that the legislation is more about future needs than past behaviour. This is why in many ways, alternatives to the court process, such as mediation and collaborative law, are actually more in tune with the legislation. They are also  forward-looking processes, more concerned with fixing the problem than fixing the blame.

Brid Manifold is a family-law solicitor and mediator based in Galway City. Her monthly columns will cover a range of family-law and mediation issues. Email your questions in confidence to Brid at familylaw@mayonews.ie.