Legal Advice for Unmarried Parent

EvaG123

Hi all,

Could anyone please advise me on where to seek legal advice regarding providing for and seeing a child?

A few particulars of the situation:

My partner has a young child as a result of a one night stand before we were together.
He has made an informal maintenance agreement with the mother and pays monthly into her bank account. His name is not on the child's birth certificate.

I completely accept this wee kid in our lives and we are delighted to see him and happy to provide for him but as the mother is someone neither I or my partner know very well, while things are amicable at the moment I basically want to know what we could face in our futures and how it could affect any children we have in future or even my financial situation after our wedding.

Though the mother is from Ireland, she lives and works in the North and the child was born there so if anything official was drawn up I imagine it would need to be based on UK rules and UK court system and UK fathers rights. This has been complicating anything I attempt to find out by reading online. UK info is all based on people living there, Irish info based on people living here. I feel we need to speak to a legal professional who maybe has experience of both systems or has dealt with parents who live in different states. Could anyone point us in the right direction?

The questions I am hoping to answer are:

- If my partner seeks official access rights, would he get them or get a reduced amount considering he lives 'in a different country' despite the fact that it's only a couple of hours up the road?
- If my partner and I decide to have children, would he be allowed to reduce his maintenance if he needed to or would providing for the child we have together be considered within our means as long as I could afford it myself (I earn more than my partner does and I read something in the paper today where a father who was seeking to vary his maintenance order because he couldn't afford it was ordered to give all of his wife's financial details to the court in order to ascertain whether 'they' as opposed to 'he' could afford it which has brought all this up!)

I hope this doesn't seem like I am trying to prioritise my future family over this kid and his Mam, I'm just not great at dealing with the unknown and like to be ready for all eventualities and we are currently planning our marriage and when we might want to have a child. We both understand the realities of how much a child costs to raise and for that reason my partner has offered as much as he can to his child's mother and pays far and above what he would be asked for in court. We would never seek to do less, knowing that it affected the child, unless we absolutely had to. However, with the comments the little guy's Mam has made over the past while about things my partner and I have (isn't it well for us to live in a nice area and son on) and requests for things my partner's been asked to buy for his son being very specific (expensive) brands, sometimes I think to myself Jesus she's going to want the best of everything on pain of dragging him through a court or threatening that he can't see the little chap and if I want to have a child I'm going to have to shoulder the cost of it on my own and it definitely wont be getting the best of everything! I try very much not to think of our outgoings as 'his' and 'mine' but I'd like to know exactly how this could play out as well and the very best way for us to handle it.

If anyone could point us in the right direction we'd be very grateful.

January

You need to speak to a solicitor as we cannot give legal advice here.

Moonbeam

You can also contact Treoir.