Accord, the Catholic Bishops Marriage support agency, has received no referrals from solicitors to its counselling service this year, according to its Director of Counseling Services, John Farrelly.This is despite guidelines in the 1997 Family Law Act, which codified divorce in Ireland recommending that couples seek counselling prior to the granting of a divorce. Solicitors were asked to refer couples to marriage guidance counsellors before going to a divorce settlement, Mr Farrelly told ciNews.
“All the effort is being put into the divorce side of things, and very little effort is going towards intervening at the start of the process, before the couple get to court,” he continued.
He was responding to Tuesday's report in The Irish Times regarding divorce court statistics.
The report found that 90 per cent of divorces were settled amicably, without the need for a lengthy court battle.
Mr Farrelly said: “Divorce is not a one-off event, there is a whole process that couples go through. A lot of people don't seem to realise this.”
Calling married people “the silent majority who just get on with things”, Mr Farrelly said there was a need for the Government to do more to assist married couples “from the very start of their relationships”.
“All married couples go through difficult times. Often the support mechanisms are not there,” he continued.
While he acknowledged that the Family Support Agency did a lot of good work, he argued that marriage as an institution needed specific governmental support.
At the moment, marriage simply wasn't getting the recognition it deserved, Mr Farrelly said.
“If you look at reports from the Department of Family and Social Affairs, for example, you will have to look very long and hard to find any reference to the word 'marriage'.”
Mr Farrelly, whose new book entitled The Good Marriage Guide will be launched next month, said that married couples needed to take a number of steps to maintain their marriage.
Married couples need to maintain what he called “boundaries of well being”. “Families are not just economic units, they are relationships,” he said. Spouses needed to take steps to stop their relationships becoming economic victims.
To do this, they needed to take time to think about how to achieve a work life balance and “come off autopilot”, Mr Farrelly continued.
Honesty was another vital component of a healthy marriage, he said. “Couples need to maintain honesty in the relationship at all times.”
But perhaps the most important advice, Mr Farrelly said, was that husband and wife “should put each other first”.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce