REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE FAMILY LAWYERS ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE POWERSCOURT HOUSE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE FAMILY LAWYERS ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE POWERSCOURT HOUSE, POWERSCOURT, ENNISKERRY
Dia dhíbh a chairde. It’s good to be here with you all at the opening of the Four Jurisdictions Family Law Conference. My particular thanks to Cormac Corrigan, Chair of the Family Lawyers Association, for his kind invitation to join you this evening. It’s encouraging and reassuring to see here at this conference the pooling of family law expertise from the four neighbouring jurisdictions. Each jurisdiction operates within a different legal and constitutional context but the professional wisdom and experience you bring to this conference has been gleaned from very similar human contexts and problems. You come here as problem solvers or facilitators of solutions and in the willingness to share your insights, to listen to the ideas of others and to distil your accumulated wisdom, there is a chance that we could all become better at constructing and delivering effective family law services. Why is that worth doing? Because families matter, to the individual, the community and the country. Article 41 of Ireland’s 1937 Constitution is devoted to the family which is recognised as the “natural and primary fundamental unit group of society and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law”. The Article goes on to say that the State “guarantees to protect the family….. as the necessary basis for social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the nation and the State.” That Constitutional protection and position remains of paramount importance in framing family law today. Underpinning it is a view that the stronger the family the stronger the country, that no matter how nuclear or individuated or isolated families become their welfare is not simply a personal or private matter but a matter of public concern and interest for where there is family dysfunction individuals and society suffer.
Leo Tolstoy famously said "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Families that need the help of lawyers are generally in a mess, coping with the chaos of broken or dysfunctional relationships. You are only too familiar with the catalogue of extensive downstream emotional, psychological and sometimes physical consequences. The application of the law, while no antidote to trauma, is so often an attempt to restore equilibrium, to bring order, fairness and justice, to create the space in which caprice and chaos are corralled and in which a steadier certainty can grow. Sometimes that order may help facilitate reconciliation or give shape to long-term estrangement. Sometimes it may involve dividing property or dividing the lives of children. It may involve protection of family members from one another or ensuring financial responsibilities are copper-fastened.
You are not doctors, psychiatrists or psychologists, you are not pastoral counsellors or life coaches yet in the field of family law practice, more than any other area of legal practice you are right in the front line of the frequently painful fall-out from the breakdown of people's most profound and intimate relationships. This form of legal practice is not the same as most others for you face into the immediacy of high levels of grief, regret, anger, fear, resentment, worry, distrust and all the rest. To clear the decks so that the law can do its job calls for exceptional personal skills of wisdom, diplomacy and empathy which are not always routinely taught in law school or found in legal texts.
You also work in a very dynamic social and legal context where throughout the second half of the last century a new culture of gender equality, of expanded personal rights and legal remedies has radically impacted on family life and structure. It is still very much a work in progress but families today in all our jurisdictions have a much greater range of legal options and supports to help deal with problems than they had access to even a generation ago. The very notion of family is itself a dynamic and changing phenomenon with more children than every growing up in non-traditional models of households.
The past fifty years have seen a host of evolutions in enhanced provision for family members relating to inheritance and succession, maintenance, ownership of the family home, legal protection from a violent spouse, abolition of the status of illegitimacy, the repositioning at centre-stage of the welfare of children, the dilution of old patriarchal attitudes, the introduction of family mediation and counselling services and the introduction of divorce. Other significant changes are currently on the government’s agenda and there have been some important changes too in the way people experience legal processes. Like doctors, lawyers should in such delicate and difficult situations make sure that at the very least they do not make things worse. The purely adversarial, winner takes all culture of the common law is clearly not best suited to situations where the parties are destined to be entwined to some extent in each others lives long after the court case is settled and where some element of residual goodwill is needed to ensure legal agreements or decisions are adhered to. Today there are welcome efforts towards more collaborative or mediated settlement procedures which are designed to nurture whatever goodwill can be mustered and to refocus the parties on a healthy future which is not always carrying the full weight/threat of the toxins of the past.
Yours is an exceptionally difficult vocation for what you do and how you do it may impact radically on your clients and their children for a lifetime and beyond it. It is draining and often frustrating work but for the vulnerable and suffering men, women and children caught up in the terrible drama of relationship dysfunction, it is essential that they know there is help and that you are there. Thank you for committing to this work and for committing to doing your best to ensure that you give clients the comfort of credible, accessible, wise support during a difficult part of their life’s journey. Thank you too for helping to educate the wider public about the things that need to be done to ensure that families seek and get effective help. Margaret Mead warned us “Nobody has ever asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation.” With the current pressures from sudden unemployment, high levels of indebtedness and reducing opportunity, many families are finding their resilience tested as never before. Thankfully the enduring robustness of the family and of community are our strengths during these worrying times but for some families they are a pressure too far, a stretch of coping skills beyond their capacity. Some of them will make their way to your doors and I hope that through the things learnt and taught here at this conference you will be even better prepared professionally and personally to guide them wisely and confidently through their most difficult times. Enjoy the conference, enjoy each other’s company and of course, may you return from the delights of beautiful County Wicklow refreshed and inspired with new ideas, energy and enthusiasm.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.