Prenuptial contracts are common in the celebrity world, but 120 family law solicitors will assemble in Blackhall Place, Dublin, today to explore how ordinary couples could benefit for "prenups".
Parenting, lifestyle choice, mutual nurturing and psychological issues can all be included in a prenuptial agreement, according to Mr Geoffrey Shannon, solicitor, Irish expert on the European Commission for Family Law and author of Children and the Law.
Prenuptial agreements tend to be associated in the public mind with money and property, especially when a wealthy person is marrying a poor one, or when a propertied foreigner is marrying in another country.
But such contracts could be just as relevant to the Irish men and women who worry about the future of their three bed-semi, the holiday home in Wexford and the city-centre apartment bought as an investment property, according to Mr Shannon, who will address his colleagues at the Law Society conference today.
"The marriage contract is the most important contract any of us will ever sign, yet most of us enter into it with a naivety that is frightening," according to Mr Shannon.
More Irish couples are seeking pre-marital and even post-marital agreements, since the coming into force of the Family Law (Divorce) Act, 1996. In Irish law, there is nothing to prevent engaged couples from signing a pre-nuptial agreement. The difficulty is that the courts are not obliged to enforce such an agreement should the parties separate or divorce.
Irish family law gives judges a wider discretion over the distribution of a separating or divorcing couple's assets than their counterparts virtually anywhere else, and this unfettered discretion looks set to continue.
However, the 1996 Act has opened the way for pre-nuptial contracts to become an integral part of the family law system, as they are in many EU states, Canadian provinces, US states, New Zealand and most recently Australia. The central purpose of a pre-nuptial contract is that of offering certainty for the future. It is primarily about money and property, but may also contain confidentiality clauses about lifestyle during the marriage.
"Irish courts should give effect to pre-nuptial agreements as long as they are fairly entered into, with independent legal advice and full disclosure of both sides' assets and property, subject to the interests of any children and with a discretion for the court to disregard any agreement that produced an unfair result," Mr Shannon said. "The pre-nuptial agreement is merely a type of contract, 'an idea whose time has come'. There is no reason why a pre-nuptial agreement should be prima facie unenforceable."