Greater powers on guardianship urged

THE GOVERNMENT could give the courts greater powers to appoint guardians for children at risk if it commenced a provision already contained in childcare legislation, the president of the Law Reform Commission has said.

Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness said the 1997 Children’s Act contains a provision to give the courts greater powers to appoint a guardian ad litem, a person to represent the interests of the child, in childcare cases.

Commenting in the aftermath of the Roscommon incest case, which saw a mother jailed for seven years for the neglect and abuse of her six children, Mrs Justice McGuinness said the provision was one of two sections in the Act not introduced 11 years after the legislation was passed.

“It can be brought by a statutory instrument,” she said.

She said she accepted that being in a family is the best place for a child in probably 99.9 per cent of cases, but that was not always the case.

Mrs Justice McGuinness said in Ireland there was not any kind of infrastructure for the appointment of a guardian ad litem and the matter tended to be left to the discretion of the judge.

And judges were left to work within the provisions in the Child Care Act 1991, which were limited because of lobbying by family lawyers when the legislation was going through the Dáil.

Speaking on RTÉ radio last night, Mrs Justice McGuinness also said a constitutional amendment to protect children could make a difference.

“You can’t ever say that a constitutional change or a legal change will absolutely ascertain that something dreadful won’t happen,” she said.

“The one difference that it does make is to the atmosphere in which childcare cases would be approached. There would be more of an atmosphere of putting the child’s rights first, rather than thinking of the parents’ rights and the family rights first.

“It’s about a structural and atmospheric change as much as anything else.”

But, Mrs Justice McGuinness warned that a constitutional amendment would not mean a great deal if we were not prepared to put resources into it.

She also said she believed lessons would be learned from the Roscommon case.

“The pity is we didn’t put in resources when we had the money,” she said.