Family Law Cases Dail Éireann — 2022-11-17 ============================================================ Mary Butler (FF), Waterford On behalf of the Minister, I again thank Deputy Durkan for raising this really important matter. The Minister intends to reform how our family law system operates to make it more efficient and user-friendly and less adversarial and to develop a system that puts the family at the centre of its work. That is very welcome. The Department also arranged for a separate strand of independent research on parental alienation to be carried out last year. The Minister is pleased to say that a draft report has been received by the Department and is being reviewed. It is expected that the research and the public consultation will create a deeper understanding of the issue and inform the Department's consideration of policy in law in this area. Work is ongoing to integrate these strands of work and the Minister expects a report outlining the outcome of the research and consultation process and any resulting recommendations. I take on board the Deputy's point. This is really welcome news and cannot happen soon enough but it is the immediate term about which the Deputy is concerned and I will certainly pass on his comments to the Minister. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-11-17/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:18+00:00 Sitting date: 2022-11-17