Every financial question on this site — the business, the farm, the pension, the home — is ultimately answered by one framework: the court’s obligation to ensure proper provision, given content by the section 20 factors of the Family Law (Divorce) Act 1996. Understand the framework and every negotiation makes sense; skip it and you’re bargaining blind. Here it is, without the folklore.
The Factors, and How Cases Are Argued
Section 20 directs the court to weigh, among others: income, earning capacity, property and resources on each side; needs and obligations; the pre-breakdown standard of living; ages and the marriage’s duration; health; contributions — with home-making and caring explicitly valued alongside earning; the effect of family responsibilities on earning capacity (the career set aside counts, and its cost is provision’s business); accommodation needs; conduct only where it would be unjust to ignore (a high bar — affairs don’t forfeit provision; the conduct that moves money is financial: concealment, dissipation); and any subsisting separation agreement’s terms. The factors are the grammar of every argument: cases are won by showing how they cash out on these facts — the twenty years in the yard or the business, the career surrendered, the inheritance’s origin — not by quoting percentages at each other.
Ample Resources, and the Absent Clean Break
Where assets comfortably exceed needs — the ample resources cases this site is built for — the analysis shifts: needs stop being the ceiling, contributions and the marriage’s history carry more weight, discretion widens, and disclosure and valuation quality decide more than doctrine does; these are the cases that gravitate to the High Court. And over all of it, Irish law’s structural honesty: there is no clean break — provision is an ongoing obligation, variation and further applications exist — which is a reason to settle properly rather than a reason settlements fail: full disclosure (concealment is what reopens deals), realistic terms, succession rights extinguished by order, structures that anticipate life changing. Durability is drafted, and it is drafted here — the machinery that delivers it: maintenance, pension adjustment, property orders and lump sums, composed as one structure.
What Would Provision Look Like for You?
Ranges, not promises - the section 20 analysis applied to your actual facts in one confidential call, with the honest arithmetic in writing.
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