There is something deeply chastening for liberal society in the fact that it
has taken the interest of an international celebrity and a scatter of colourful stunts and protests to alert it to the obscenities of the family law system.
It is chastening that the facts alone were not enough, and chastening, too, to observe that, absent Bob Geldof and the UK campaign group Fathers 4 Justice, liberal opinion might have succeeded in ensuring that the discussion was stillborn.
It is deeply shameful that so many of those who claim to speak on behalf of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised have not merely sought to ignore what is undoubtedly the most grotesque abuse of human rights in modern societies, but that they have actually supplied the bulwark of reaction which has sought to block change and stifle the necessary debate. Some, “liberals” are still doing it, albeit mostly in much more carefully-couched terms than a decade ago.
The facts of the matter in Ireland are as stark as elsewhere. To begin with, and notwithstanding that one in three children born in Ireland now are conceived and born out of wedlock, the Irish Constitution, in its letter and as interpreted by the Supreme Court over four decades, gives no recognition to unmarried fathers. This means that men who become fathers in such circumstances can know their children only on the basis of concessions by the mother.
The legal profession can dress it up however it likes, but even a cursory study of what we know of what happens in family law cases involving unmarried parents leads to the ineluctable conclusion that the legal system does not believe fathers should be anything more than a name on a bank standing order. And this logic has been gradually and insidiously adapted to apply also to divorced and separated fathers, who are frequently de facto denied any meaningful application of the limited protections a marriage certificate might seem to imply. All this, of course, means that children, whose moral rights to have relationships with their fathers are inseparable from their fathers’ rights to father them, are also trampled into the dust.
There are many legal and cultural streams feeding into the present torrent of obscenity that is our family law system: cultural inheritance, societal convenience, intellectual laziness, entrenched financial interests, ideological malevolence and ignorance arising from the fact that the immorality in question happens in secret courts unaccountable to democratic society. But in the end it all washes down to the stark reality that, in a society laying claim to democratic principles, the law and most of its practitioners treat fathers with outright contempt and hostility. As someone who has campaigned on these and related issues for a decade, I perceive the legal situation as inseparable from the wider cultural context, of which the public discussion, or non-discussion, is symptomatic.
The recent Fathers’ Day debate on RTE’s The Sunday Show provides a case-in-point. It was, potentially, an epoch-shattering moment, when something of the full truth of the barbarism of family law seemed about to slip through the usual barriers of prejudice, ideology and fudge. Bob Geldof (pictured below), on a mobile phone from a London park, made the case for common sense as he always does.
Benig Mauger, on a line from Connemara, touched on some of the content of her wonderful book, Reclaiming Father, which outlines the true scale of the damage and wrong being perpetrated by a society which fails to comprehend what a father does. Then, astonishingly, the voice of Alan Shatter, the principal architect of modern Irish family law, could be heard acknowledging that the other two had a point. For the first time in a decade of campaigning on these issues, I heard a senior Irish lawyer concede the substance of the case against his profession.
Shatter defined one of the central issues as the abuse of power by mothers who seek to use children as instruments of manipulation and revenge against fathers, and admitted that the courts are powerless to prevent this. This was a simple acknowledgement of the everyday reality whereby mothers are known to flout access orders with complete impunity because no judge has the bottle to impose the only sanction the law allows – imprisonment – allegedly because this would not be in the “interests” of children. That the same judges have no problem sending fathers to jail for non-payment of maintenance for children they never see is, of course, self-evidently in the interests of children.
This is not by any means the only, the primary or even the most immediate problem arising from family law, but it is certainly a major issue. For Shatter to concede this point was a major breakthrough, and an admission not without grace. Usually, family lawyers tend to filibuster such discussions by nudging them into spurious debates about the intractable nature of inter-personal disputes, creating a tragic picture of a valiant and despairing legal profession, helpless in the face of human nature. To hear the most influential family lawyer of recent decades concede that the problem was actually that the law and its institutions were standing idly by while the powerful trampled on the human rights of the unprotected, was a bit like De Klerk acknowledging some of the evils of apartheid.
But into this moment of hope strode the reactionary size nines of Ivana Bacik (pictured above). Bacik’s contributions to such discussions are usually no worse than vapid, being typical of the contentless prejudice of most liberal discussion in Ireland, which is preoccupied with asserting a pious attachment to causes long won as a means of avoiding anything inconvenient to the fashionable liberal package of ideologies. But, here, at this potentially historic moment, a filibuster would not have sufficed. Oh now, let’s not demonise mothers here, said Ivana, before going on to distort a point Bob Geldof had made about it taking some time for a culture to adjust - Bacik implied that he meant that most fathers will walk away from their children. That’s so much better, Ivana - let’s just get right back to what we like best: demonising fathers.
And let’s remember, said Ivana, that it’s mothers who have been mainly responsible for the care of children. Decoded: everything’s fine the way it is, so let’s stop listening to these whining men (dashed inconvenient that this Geldof guy has got involved here, you’d think he’d stick to the human rights of foreigners) and go back to talking about why there aren’t more women in the European Parliament.
Nobody thought of hitting Ivana with the obvious riposte: yes, and until recently, lawyers and wanna-be politicians tended to be men, so let’s go back to that, eh? The fact that such illogicalities and distortions can go unchallenged in even relatively combative company highlights how easy it has been for reactionary pseudo-liberals to short-circuit any proper discussion of this most fundamental denial of human rights, while disguising the true nature of their chauvinistic obscurantism behind a conventional piety.
People often ask me: where is the front on this issue? Is it the law? Is it the culture? Is it the gender war? Is it the war between those who say there is a war and those who say there isn’t? After many years exploring these issues from the inside out and then back in, I have come to the conclusion that the most urgent requirement is to put an end to the distortion and disinformation being fed into the discussion by the ideologically or professionally interested.
The laws won’t be changed until public opinion confronts politicians with an urgent demand that this be done. The culture won’t become conscious until a full and truthful discussion begins to resonate with the lived experience of real people. But none of this can happen while the discussion is dominated by the voices of darkness disguised as something else.
Society at large needs to wake up to the fact that those who are wronged by the present system and culture are not, as people like Bacik seek to suggest, the powerful advocates of an oppressive patriarchy, but, increasingly, confused, powerless young men. It surely does not require a hugely creative imagination to envisage the potential confusion of such a young man who, finding that he has become a father in a society which in its rhetoric claims to demand that he be a loving and responsible parent, goes about seeking to find a way to be so. Imagine, then, his feelings on encountering the legal and cultural reality of that society, which at every turn seeks to block and frustrate him in seeking to do what he is told he should. In its muttered asides, the society predicts that this father will walk away from his child, and by its every action sees to that he has no choice, short of inviting penury and madness, but to do precisely this. And then observe the vindication of said society as it triumphantly declares: “I told you so”. As I have frequently observed, not least through personal experience, the only time Irish society will disparage a father more than it does when he walks away is when he doesn’t walk away. Then what he invites is the opprobrium of the hypocrisy he has exposed by calling its bluff.
One of the central political problems with this issue is that its moral centre relates to the rights of men, whom liberal society refuses to recognise as deserving of support. Men do not constitute an approved victimology, so there are no liberal kudos to be accrued by defending them. Moreover, because public perception has a tendency to fossilise around long-outmoded notions of weak and strong, a powerful and reactionary new establishment can, for years on end, continue passing itself off as a beleaguered opposition.
Hence, Ivana Bacik, an influential lawyer, politician and university professor trading under the feminist banner, is allowed to continue presenting herself as confronting some oppressive, grey-bearded patriarchal monolith which seeks to keep her and her sisters down, when in actual fact, it is she and her like-minded reactionary sisters who now seek to prolong the disenfranchisement of men who, as often as not, are powerless, uneducated and young enough to be the grandsons of these alleged victims of patriarchal oppression.
Isn’t it time we conducted an inventory of the true nature of reaction in Irish society?

John Waters’ latest book The Politburo Has Decided That You Are Unwell, just published by The Liffey Press, contains a number of essays on fatherhood and men in Irish society