2 questions:

LegacyUser

Hi Everyone,

I'm a long time poster going unregged for this.

I used to live abroad with my ex and I now live in Ireland, with our son.
Long story short, my ex remains abroad where we used to live, and comes over once a month to spend time with the baby. He chooses the dates and frequency of his visits, if he wanted to come over more regularly, that would be fine.

I have had to move back home, and to facilitate his visits, he stayed in a spare room in my family house to save on hotels, for about 8 months after we had broken up.

It meant that I had to be around him all the time on his visit, which wasn't great as we argued, and it wasted his quality time with his son.
My mum refused to have him come to the house anymore as he was rude and unpleasant so I told him he must make other arrangements in future.

I have also taken the baby over to where he lives to spend time with him.
Our relationship is very up and down now, and it looks like we might end up in court.

Always in the past, he would arrive Saturday morning and leave on Sunday eve. The baby stays over with him now when he comes. On the sunday, I would end up spending most of the day with him as he can't drive so i would take him where he wanted to go and bring him to the airport.

But our relationship is really disintegrating now, I don't want to see him on his next visit but he knows no one here, doesn't make any plans for activities with the baby- its fine on saturday as he has a hotel room, but the sundays are a problem- he has nothing to do and nowhere to go.
If anyone has any advice on how to handle the next visit, that would be great:)

Some background:
A major problem is my lack of trust in him, in the past he has threatened to have the baby kidnapped in his home country if i didn't do what he wanted, and its one of the main reasons we separated. It took a huge leap of trust to allow the baby to stay with him in a hotel without me there, but we were getting on much better then. The baby has a passport that I keep, but its very easy to get on a ferry to the uk at least. His home country is in North Africa, and I have absolutely refused to allow the baby to go, but as things are so bad between us now, that I really worry about him legging it- I just don't know.
Does anyone know if its possible for me to give the guards his name, and it gets flagged if he attempts to catch a ferry?

desbrook

I'm presuming in all that this child is an Irish citizen .

You aren't married therefore this man does not have automatic rights to see this child (he has obligations to maintain him but obviously it is complicated if he is living in anther country) . Therefore you really don't need to go to court if you really feel this child is in danger of being abducted . You just simply need to refuse unsupervised and unscheduled access and tell him HE needs to go to court if that's not good enough . Also stop playing mammy to him as well as the child . If he wants to see him especially unsupervised its up to him to organise accomadation and transport and to do so as well as activites- at agreed ,set times set out in a court order . If you need to help he should pay your petrol etc .

My hunch is he won't bother with court . Even if he did you have a strong argument that he should not have unsupervised access - not because he might abduct his son but because he does not have suitable accomadation , activities etc . I'm not going easy on you either - you will have to supervise this access if you want your son to have it - and you want to keep your son . I know you find dealing with the man difficult but it's better than the horror of your son being taken . As I undertand it there is no mechanism in place for the Guards to do what you mention .