The High Court has refused a father’s application for an order returning his daughter to Slovakia, finding that the family moved to Ireland together and that the child was habitually resident here by the time her father left in August 2021.
The case concerned Olivia, a child aged 10 at the time of the judgment. Her parents are identified in the judgment only as W. The father argued that he had not consented to the move and that his daughter had been wrongfully retained in Ireland. The mother relied on consent and acquiescence, and asked the court to consider the child’s views.
Justice Mary Rose Gearty said the parents’ custody rights and the father’s exercise of them were not in dispute. The family travelled to Ireland together in June 2021. The judge found there was no issue of wrongful removal at that point; the dispute concerned whether the child’s continued stay became wrongful after the father returned to Slovakia in August.
The judge preferred the mother’s account that the move was intended to allow the family to seek work and potentially settle in Ireland. Among the evidence she relied on were messages about the planned move, the child’s Slovakian school agreeing to hold her place for a year, and the father’s own statement that he intended to stay in Ireland permanently if the move worked out. The judge found the father’s evidence unreliable and concluded that the child was habitually resident in Ireland by August 2021. The father had therefore failed to prove that she remained habitually resident in Slovakia when the alleged wrongful retention began.
The judge also found that the father had acquiesced in the child remaining in Ireland. She noted that he took no clear steps to secure his daughter’s return between August 2021 and July 2022, and found no written evidence supporting his claim that the parents had agreed she would return in August or December. The judge relied in part on an April 2022 message in which he told his daughter that if she came home to Slovakia, she could return to Ireland whenever she wanted.
Olivia told an independent assessor she would feel sad and scared if made to return to Slovakia and did not want to go. The judge considered her views mature and strongly expressed. She said that, even if the court’s findings on consent were wrong, she would have refused a return order because the Convention’s objectives did not outweigh the child’s views in the circumstances.
The court concluded that the father was not entitled to an order returning the child. The judgment does not make a separate custody or access order.