Analysis of the Government Research Report ‘The Operation of the In Camera Rule in Family Law Proceedings’

 

Analysis of the Department of Justice Research Report 

‘The Operation of the In Camera Rule in Family Law Proceedings’

What the report is and why it matters.

The research report is a Department of Justice commissioned research report (UCC/TCD) produced as part of the Family Justice Strategy. It starts from the constitutional tension, Irish justice is presumptively administered in public, but family and child care matters are among the ‘special and limited’ categories that can be heard otherwise than in public, chiefly to protect privacy, especially the privacy of children.

The central premise of the report is that the privacy objective is legitimate and should remain, but the current ‘in camera rule’ is poorly understood, unevenly applied, and insufficiently defined, with knock on effects for access to justice, accountability, and public confidence.

How the research was carried out?

The report uses a mixed methods design:

• A literature and legislative / case law review (to map how ‘otherwise than in public’ is currently structured and interpreted in Ireland).

 

• A comparative review of four jurisdictions: Sweden and Australia (more open models) and New Zealand and England & Wales (closed systems but with clearer transparency mechanisms).

 

• Primary evidential work including an online survey of people with direct experience of family / child care proceedings, semi structured interviews with judges, and multiple focus groups across professional and civil society stakeholders.

Methodologically, that breadth is a major strength, it avoids treating ‘in camera’ as a purely legal doctrine and instead tests how it operates in lived practice across court users, professionals, and the judiciary.

Core findings: what is going wrong in practice?

The rule’s parameters are not clearly defined, so people over interpret it (and courts apply it inconsistently). A repeated finding is the absence of a single, comprehensive framework setting out what the rule covers, what it permits, when it begins and ends, and what ‘publication’ actually means in modern life (social media, messaging apps, remote hearings). The report says this vacuum leaves judges and professionals to ‘fill in the gaps’, producing uneven practice and uncertainty.

This uncertainty shows up starkly in the qualitative accounts, the report records significant inconsistency between judges and courts and even notes a judge’s characterisation of the landscape as ‘the Wild West’.

The report identifies examples where strict or cautious interpretations lead to parties being unable to access therapeutic supports comfortably, difficulty bringing a support person, and (critically) restrictive access to important case material such as expert / court-ordered reports. It treats these not as minor inconveniences but as potentially serious access to justice issues.

On Section 32 reports specifically, the report highlights a mismatch between what the law envisages (a copy to parties) and what often happens in practice (limited supervised viewing, no retained copy) due to fears of breach, potentially contrary to legislative intent and disproportionate in its effects.

A lack of transparency is feeding mistrust and limits public understanding.

The report argues that, despite earlier reforms since 2004, many hoped for benefits (greater accountability, more written reporting, more statistics and predictable jurisprudence) have not materialised. Professionals and court users describe how the lack of reporting and the scarcity of accessible lower-court judgments can make family justice feel opaque and arbitrary, and can mask poor practice or inconsistent judicial approaches.

The report documents that parties and professionals frequently perceive enforcement as weak or inconsistent, with many believing ‘nothing is done’ if the rule is broken. From the judicial perspective, the report notes that responses tend to be admonishments / undertakings unless breaches are serious, wilful, and repeated. It also flags the practical difficulty that, once information is posted online, the damage is often already done.

The recommendations: what is proposed (and what it is trying to achieve)

The report’s overall reform package is probably best understood as, retain privacy, but modernise the framework so it is clear, proportionate, enforceable, and compatible with transparency and support needs.

It recommends renaming the ‘in camera rule’ to the ‘privacy and transparency rule’ to reflect what the rule is actually trying to do (protect privacy without extinguishing transparency).

It also recommends a clear, consistent definition across all relevant proceedings, explicitly warning that if the rule is drafted or applied too widely, it can end up restricting more than is necessary to protect privacy and may interfere with access to justice and legitimate transparency.

Key transparency measures include, publishing a meaningful proportion of anonymised judgments (including from lower courts), with an anonymisation support team to make this feasible and safe.

It also proposes a structured model of media attendance / reporting, a presumptive right of attendance for accredited / authorised media (tied to ethics/standards), judicial discretion to refuse access in specific cases, and clear training / guidance so reporting is lawful and proportionate.

It recommends practical supports like a clearer communication strategy (so parties actually understand what they can and can’t do), mandatory training across the system, and greater scope for court accompaniment / support persons (subject to appropriate safeguards).

On a point that often causes real world difficulty, it recommends parties should be allowed to retain copies of court-ordered reports (including Section 32 and 47), with strong warnings and sanctions against making them public.

The report recommends that legislation should specify what constitutes a breach (including social media publication) and that sanctions should be clearer, potentially distinguishing inadvertent from malicious or repeated breaches. It draws on comparative models to show that other jurisdictions tend to have much clearer statutory penalty structures than Ireland currently does.

The main recommendation is that these changes should not be left to piecemeal amendments and practice drift, it calls for primary legislation covering definition, information sharing, permissible private communication, reporting structures, and a coherent sanctions regime across proceedings held otherwise than in public.

What the report does well, and where it is vulnerable.

The report is genuinely multi perspective and practice facing. The report doesn’t treat the rule as a theoretical abstraction, it tests how it is understood by litigants, professionals, and judges, which is exactly where the current system appears to be breaking down.

It avoids the false choice of ‘privacy vs transparency’. A consistent theme is ‘keep family hearings private, but stop letting ‘privacy’ become a catch all that blocks support, learning, accountability, and lawful reporting.’

The recommendations are unusually operational. The proposals for an anonymisation team, minimum publication targets, training, and clear guidance are concrete enough to be turned into policy, rather than staying at the level of principle.

Online surveys and voluntary participation can sometimes skew toward people with strong feelings (especially negative experiences). That does not invalidate the findings, confusion and inconsistency are repeatedly corroborated across cohorts, but it does mean the report is stronger at identifying problems and themes than at quantifying prevalence across the whole population of family court users.

Children’s perspectives are acknowledged as vital but not directly gathered for this specific project. The report itself notes that consultation with children and young people about reform of the rule was beyond its scope, even though it argues reform should be informed by those perspectives. That creates an evidential gap, especially around media attendance and reporting and what ‘privacy’ means from a child’s standpoint.

Some of the recommendations may be more difficult to implement in the District and Circuit Courts than the report allows for in terms of resources and cost. Publishing 10 to 15% of judgments from District / Circuit family lists is attractive for transparency, but it carries resource implications (time, drafting support, anonymisation, quality control). The report proposes an anonymisation team, which is sensible, but implementation will still require staffing, workflows, and judicial buy in.

The report’s model (presumptive right, discretion, ethics/training) is coherent and aligns with comparative experience, but Irish conditions (small communities, rare fact patterns, ‘jigsaw identification’) can make anonymisation weak even when names are removed. That risk is manageable, but only if guidance is extremely practical (what details must never be reported, how to handle orders / reasons, how to avoid identification through combinations of facts).

Sanctions reform needs proportionality to avoid chilling effects. The report is absolutely right to say sanctions are unclear and that social media changes everything. But if reform leans too heavily into punitive enforcement, it could discourage exactly the ‘permitted’ communications the report wants to protect (support services, therapeutic contexts, safeguarding disclosures). The better reading of the report is that the goal is a graded, clearly signposted framework, so ordinary, good faith support seeking is safe, and malicious doxing / campaigning is meaningfully deterred.

GDPR/data protection issues are explicitly left unfinished. The report flags that the interaction between the privacy rule and data protection is contested and needs dedicated research. That is an important caveat, because information sharing reforms and publication / anonymisation proposals will inevitably collide with data governance questions in practice.

What’s the Bottom line?

The report’s diagnosis is fairly persuasive, Ireland’s privacy regime in family/child care courts is doing necessary protective work, but it is undermined by vague boundaries, inconsistent application, and weak transparency infrastructure, leading to confusion, avoidable barriers to support and participation, and a public information vacuum.

Its strongest contribution is that it offers a reform architecture that doesn’t require abandoning private hearings. Define the rule properly, permit and protect private / support communications, publish more anonymised outputs, allow controlled media observation and reporting, and put sanctions on a clear statutory footing, ideally through primary legislation rather than incremental patching.

If you would like to read the research report in full click here: The Operation of the In Camera Rule in Family Law Proceedings