The process of marital breakdown is almost inevitably a deeply painful one. In general, there are no winners, only losers, especially when there are children involved. And often they are the biggest losers of all, caught between warring parents in a vicious adversarial legal system that most often prolongs and deepens the damage caused by marital breakdown.
There is a complex history that underpins this. Without a doubt, women suffered greatly in the past at the hands of men, in dysfunctional relationships. And many men failed dismally to acknowledge their equal responsibility for the nurturing and raising of children.
But there is mounting evidence that the family law courts and the legal apparatus in this area have become so weighted against men that fathers are now the victims of institutional discrimination on a grand scale.
It is extremely difficult to legislate for situations in which emotions hold such an enormous sway. The desire to punish the individual who has strayed away from the marital nest, or betrayed the other partner in love, runs deep.
On top of this is the presumption that women are better with children, that their bond is deeper and more natural, that they are the nurturing ones.
But fathers have equal rights too – and they are beginning to demand them. A legislative response is long overdue. There are hundreds of genuinely loving, caring men who are denied proper access to their children. Behind each man, there is a story. Here, we present three accounts of breakdown, conflict and eventual resolution that make painful and harrowing – but highly informative – reading.
What’s frightening is that these three men, victims all, are among the lucky ones.

CASE HISTORY 1: KEVIN
“I was married for 16 years when my wife said she wanted a separation. She had been planning this for a number of months. She was a very unhappy woman in herself who hadn’t had a good or happy upbringing and was unhappy in her job. We went to counselling, I think twice, and it was very clear from the counselling that my wife was not serious about it. The next step was mediation, to see if we could both get out of it in the most amicable way possible and to discuss the children, the money etc.
“We had agreed at the third mediation session that it would be 50/50 – joint custody and split all our assets. I was happy with that. After the third mediation meeting, what you had to do was go away for a couple of weeks, think about it, then come back and finalise it. We came back to the fourth meeting, and at that stage my wife said, ‘I’m not happy’. I was surprised and so was the mediator. She said, ‘I’m not happy because I’ve serious allegations to make about my husband’. It was at that stage she accused me of sexually abusing the children. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I was completely shocked. I said, ‘This didn’t happen’. My ex-wife said that she had proof and a witness. I went to my own solicitor immediately, who told me the next week I must challenge her and challenge ‘the witness’.
“So I went home one evening and was going to ask the alleged witness, who happened to be in my house, did she see anything or hear anything that could have been related to this, and my wife said to me, ‘If you talk to her, I’ll call the guards’. And I said, ‘This is a very serious matter, I have to find out’. So I went and talked to ‘the witness’. She was in a very awkward situation, but I insisted on talking to her. And as I was talking to her my wife went out and called the guards.
“The guards came within five minutes. I was taken out, spent the night in the Garda station, and the next day I appeared in court for being in breach of a protection or barring order, which had been obtained ex parte, meaning my wife was able to go along some time previously, without my knowledge, and get this order. That law has changed now – you cannot get an ex parte barring order or protection order; the other party has to be notified.

“But anyway, I was taken off and I can assure you as I spent the night in the prison cell, my world was coming in on top of me. I thought I was going to be beaten up. To be taken away in a police van, to be taken out of your own house in front of your own children – it destroyed me.

“The next day I went into court, was in a holding cell before my case with my fellow prisoners, drug addicts etc, and I was brought up and an appeal was made and I was given bail in effect. And the bail meant that I had to move out of the house immediately that day, and I was barred from seeing my children or having any contact with them whatsoever until the case was resolved.
“The one exception to that was for a family occasion which I was allowed go to. I didn’t see my children until that day. My youngest child ran over and hugged me and then my other children came over, and then my wife said in a loud voice in front of everybody, ‘Leave those children alone, the police and social welfare said you’re not allowed touch those children’. Apart from my feelings, the children and members of my own family who were there as well… It’s an awful thing to do, to knowingly accuse someone of touching children when you know they didn’t do it.
“So I took the case to court to clear my name obviously and also to get access to my children. I got access to the children, but it was supervised access, and that was a torturous experience. Basically what it meant was, I was allowed see my children twice a week for four or five hours, but never on my own. The court accepted my sisters as supervisors, and they were very good, but still, it’s a very unnatural thing, going down to collect your children from your own house – now your ex-wife’s – and bringing them out for a few hours, but always with somebody. But even then my wife didn’t give up on the accusations. She actually said that there were marks on the children after coming back from access with me, and that I was abusing them despite the fact that they were supervised. She said my two sisters weren’t trustworthy, so we went into court again and said, ‘Let her nominate a supervisor’. So we did.
“The procedures are terrible for the children – and the bloke as well. In my case, the local Health Board investigated. I went up there being absolutely straight with these people, I’d nothing to hide. But when I went in, there’s no doubt about it, being the bloke you were made feel guilty.

“They obviously had the allegation and the report from the mother, and there’s no doubt they believed her, and it was up to you; rather than being innocent until proven guilty, it was the other way around.

“You’re asked, ‘Did you ever pull your children?’ and everything that you’ve ever done is analysed as if it could be taken as a sign of an aggressive or bad attitude towards your children.
“One question in particular I was asked was did I ever go into the child’s room during the night, and I said, ‘No, I don’t think so…’ and left it like that. Then I went out to my car and I thought, ‘Jesus, of course I’ve gone into the child’s room’. A child might cry at night so you go in and you might comfort the child. So I actually wrote back to the people and said, ‘Of course I did, if they were upset or whatever’. I saw the report of that interview, and it came out like this, very stark: ‘We asked him did he ever visit his child’s bedroom. At first he denied it, but he later admitted that he did’.
“What happens in these cases is the court appoints an independent child psychologist to investigate the case and come up with a report. I found it infinitely better than the Health Board, because I felt this was neutral, this was objective, and I didn’t feel as under the same pressure or made to feel guilty. But I also knew it was a horrendous experience for my children. But in the heel of the hunt, the report said that, ‘Contrary to the allegation, we know for a fact that this man didn’t do this, and would go so far as to say that he had a loving relationship with his children. This was demonstrated when one of the children openly admitted that they were put up to saying things by their mother, and in fact, as opposed to this man committing any physical abuse, our concern is the emotional abuse that the children have been subjected to by their mother’.
“One of the children broke down in front of the child psychologist and said, ‘I said those things because my mother told me to’. But it was a great relief for her to get it out. And thank god for that, because that report was the central thing. Fortunately, in the end, all these allegations were proven to be totally wrong.

“But while this was going on I lay awake at night in a cold sweat, imagining that, through innocence, a little child could be manipulated so much it could put me in the clink. But I later learned that we sometimes underestimate our children.

“I have to say the judge was excellent. I felt that he didn’t believe that anything happened, but he had to be very careful, obviously: the judge’s role in the children’s court is the protection of the children, you’re only a bit player, which is right. So procedures had to be followed. But for that period of over a year, I would go to get the children sometimes and my wife said they didn’t want to come out, and I had her in court numerous times for breaking court orders. And even when the full hearing went to court and it was absolutely proven beyond any doubt that nothing had happened and I was given 50/50 access to the children, she still tried to stop me having access. I think I was up before eight district judges to get her to comply with the custody motions.
“I wasn’t that happy with the solicitors. I developed a disgust for them and asked myself how anybody could make a living out of this. I did all the work, the writing of the affidavits, the information, and they just picked up the bill. We went through the courts for about five years and came out at the end of it, after all these false accusations, with what could’ve been attained at mediation at the very beginning. In the meantime my work had been very badly affected, and the cotsts were horrendous. I almost lost everything. Had we gone to mediation it would have cost maybe a thousand quid instead of few hundred thousand.
So that’s my story. If I could give advice to anyone, I’d say, if anything ever happened like that, talk to people. A lot of people, if they were accused of something like that, are nearly ashamed to fight it. So talk to your family and say it straight up: ‘I have been accused of this’. I found that a great help because it brought in support. Isolation will kill you.”

CASE HISTORY 2: MARK
“My situation is, I married very young, to a woman older than me. The year after my Leaving Cert I was preparing for marriage. Ten, twelve weeks after we met we were pregnant, ten weeks later we were married. It was a stormy marriage from the word go. The first time I was told to get the hell out was, I think, a week after the honeymoon, and for many, many years I was always the peacemaker. Even if I knew I had absolutely no fault whatsoever in a row, I had to take the blame simply to restore peace.
“My ex-wife grew up in a more turbulent household than I did. I grew up in a happily married household where fights were very rare and were never abusive or loud. Her experience tended to be perpetuated into our relationship. Because she’d seen more of the world than I had, in the early years of the marriage she probably had the dominant role. Because of that we settled into a cycle of recovering from fights followed by more fights, and the cycle kept getting shorter as the marriage progressed.
“There were plenty of periods of happiness, and three great kids, but once I got into my 30s I suppose the approach changed. I was less inclined to take responsibility for things that weren’t my fault and was more inclined to stand up for myself. When the old chestnut was thrown at me, ‘I want you out of here, I should’ve married someone better than you’, I started saying, ‘OK, I will’. Which she found difficult to cope with because she was more used to being able to get compliance from me by wielding a big stick.
“By my mid 30s, I knew I was not going to spend the rest of my life with my wife. There was too much personality incompatibility for me to countenance growing old together. It was shrivelling on the vine. The one thing I regret is that I didn’t bring it to an end before I started a new relationship. That was morally wrong, I accept that. I had an affair, and wasn’t very good at carrying the guilt burden of cheating, having to cover your tracks all the time, so I owned up before being found out. Shortly afterwards we separated, and then it took nearly four years to get the case into court.
“There’s a few curious dynamics that happen in a situation like mine. A couple splitting up, where there has been love in the past, there is usually some wish on the part of both parties to resolve this as cleanly and amicably as possible. Especially where there’s children involved, you logically don’t want skin and hair flying to an unreasonable degree.
“But in a situation where the bloke is seen as a wrongdoer, your battle isn’t with your ex-wife, your battle is even more so with your ex-wife’s friends who use your ex-wife as a proxy for their own insecurities, saying things like, ‘You should do this…’ and, ‘If it was me I’d…’

“In my case, my wife was inclined to go to mediation, where the whole concept is predicated on the notion that there are two reasonable individuals who are prepared to sit down maturely and unemotionally accept that the marriage is over and divide up the financial assets and liabilities in a fair manner with the help of a mediator, and at the end of the process the mediator passes on the agreement to a single lawyer and says, ‘Write that up as a separation and we’re done’.
“She initially agreed to mediation, but unfortunately her friends were of the view that she would be a fuckin’ eejit to go along with that: ‘Sure he’s got millions squirreled away somewhere’. One woman with whom I had been quite friendly even told her that she was mad not to have changed the locks on the front door, because next thing I’d be in to steal the silver. That’s the level of aggression that is downloaded on an ex-wife, and once the coven kicks in, it really increases the intensity – any sign that your ex-partner is about to be ‘reasonable’ is interpreted by her friends as not standing up for herself. So she did a u-turn on mediation, we went to court, and the outcome was she got significantly less in terms of maintenance and the lump sum than I had offered to begin with. Unfortunately it wasn’t me who got left with the surplus, it was the legal profession.
“The legal system in Ireland is utterly horrendous. It’s a great big, brutal, sadistic machine. There’s very little sensitivity in it. One of the cruellest aspects of the legal process is that it takes so bloody long. It takes about three to four years – at least that was my experience. What would happen was, about a year in we’d be ready to go to court, there’d be a court date set, then you’d turn up down at the Four Courts and discover that the other side aren’t ready.

“So you’ve psyched yourself up, your innards are in a knot, you feel like you’re about to fight for your life, and then suddenly you’re told to go away and come back in six months. You come back in six months and the same thing happens again. I was told by my lawyer that this is standard practise. It’s a psychological trick that they use to soften you up so that eventually you will turn around and say, ‘Look, take whatever you want, I want this thing to come to an end’.

“It really is like Chinese water torture. There was always some pedantic reason why we couldn’t go ahead, but you never discovered that reason until you were actually physically in the Four Courts. It’s all about breaking you down. For three days before one of those court cases, you just find yourself with no sleep, sweating bullets.
“It’s compounded by the fact that the affidavits put together are so lurid and pornographic, you’re reading about somebody that bears your name but bears no relationship to yourself. The level of indignation you feel – everything is twisted, distorted, exaggerated to a point that makes you feel you’re losing your wits. Rows or circumstances that occurred in the past that were relatively ordinary are being described by people you’ve never met, and who your wife hardly knows, in language deliberately calculated to vilify. There’s nothing more upsetting than opening the post and finding a 12-page affidavit that describes you as a total monster when you know you’re not a bad guy. Yet you’re being described as somebody who not only deserves to lose his children, but probably deserves to be behind bars. And the number of times you phone your own lawyer, screaming – or maybe crying – down the phone, ‘How can they fuckin’ say this!’
“Women are far better at being supportive of one another when they’re going through a separation. They gather around and provide emotional support, whereas most blokes don’t know how to deal with one of their friends. The best they can do is say, ‘Are you having another pint?’ or tell them a dirty joke to try and cheer them up. And the bloke himself isn’t as inclined to turn around with tears streaming down his face an say, ‘My life’s falling apart, I’m in deep shit, I don’t know where to turn next’.
“So I think there should be an organisation that provides basic no-blame advice and support on everything from accommodation to legal rights concerning children, through to a basic guide to the legal process and how it works, access to counsellors and advisors. I think any bloke, unless he’s fuckin’ Robocop, who has been through a separation, comes close to a nervous breakdown on repeated occasions, while this long protracted system plays itself out.
“I’ve seen many of my mates go through this and become the stereotypical resident of a bed-sit, who doesn’t know about cooking, fending for himself, how to iron a shirt, and who doesn’t have a load of blokes who are going to come around and go, ‘There, there’. He’s sloshing around in beer, living in intense isolation and loneliness, opening those same affidavits. How those guys keep their wits together… many of them don’t. So there’s the feeling of being under attack, and you have a sense that your wife isn’t writing this stuff, that this stuff is being written by lawyers.
“Now, several years after separation, we’re friends again, but I can tell you that friendship is virtually impossible when the trench warfare is going on. There is a tendency for the heat to dissipate and people to start to talk to each other again, but the lawyers will not allow that. Once the flames descend into embers, they turn up with a bucket of petrol, and the whole process seems to be about vilifying the other side. I found my lawyers encouraging me to put lurid things in affidavits to counter the other side and I felt very uncomfortable about that, but I had no choice but to defend myself. In the middle of it all, my solicitor turned to me and said, ‘You’d make life much easier for yourself if you came to understand that the primary objective of a lawyer is not obtaining justice for his client, it’s generating fear. Once you get your head around that fact, you’ll be better able to cope with what you’re facing’.
“But there was one very honourable judge who was totally impatient with the shenanigans on both sides. I enjoyed a high level of access to my kids from the beginning of the separation, nearly 50% of the time, and chose to live fairly close to the family home. She sued amongst other things for custody of the kids, and in court, in the witness box, I said, ‘I can concede custody on condition that I continue to enjoy the current level of access that I have enjoyed since we split’. And my wife in fairness seemed encouraging. So I was conceding custody.
“But when the judge came back with his judgment he said, ‘I note that Mrs – is looking for custody, I note that Mr – is prepared to concede custody. Denied. I’m granting joint custody because I am happy that there are two parents here who love their children equally and that these children are fortunate to have two very good parents’.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt such an emotional high. There were tears in my eyes going out of that court, after four years of vilification and having the shit kicked out of me emotionally by fucking assholes I never met before, who were only in this for money, and who did a very poor job for my wife.

“Another example of how cynical the whole system is. I was told by my lawyer that the other side’s fee, which I had to pay, was subject to an interest bill of something like 2% per month, and I said, ‘Well, we better pay quickly then’. And he said, ‘That’s all very fine, but we haven’t got an invoice yet.’ It was 14 months before they sent an invoice.
“Eventually we were legally separated. Those four years would have been the toughest of my life, my children’s lives and my ex-wife’s life. Quite frankly, I’m not sure there’s a whole lot I could have done differently, because the system takes charge. I would urge anybody separating, if it were possible to trust each other, to see if they can get a mediated assessment, which takes the lawyers out of the frame. My legal bill was well over of £100,000. That money would have bridged the gap between what I offered my wife and what the judge was in a position to order. The judge had to take into account the fact that somebody’s got to pay for this carnival. The solicitors objected to that, and he quite wisely said, ‘Hang on – there is a finite pie here. Before either party gets any of this pie, you guys have got to be paid’. And they really objected. They wriggled like fuck.
“Fortunately for me there was wisdom sitting on the bench, but I was lucky. Others have had very different experiences. I walked out feeling at least somewhat vindicated. My poor ex-wife came out getting less than I had offered her in mediation. I’d say the lawyers had forgotten her name and mine within three days.”

CASE HISTORY 3: THOMAS
“After our child was born my wife became very depressed and was unable to help take care of it. She tried, but a lot of the care fell to me as well as the breadwinning – I was actually looking after the two of them. I was a bit disturbed at my wife’s lack of what I felt to be a bond or connection with her child. We had many unsuccessful attempts to discuss it, but it seemed to be an all-or-nothing situation in terms of my wife’s reaction to any of the issues I raised. She seemed to be stuck in a reactive mode. But then again, when somebody’s very depressed it’s difficult to respond to anything.
“There was no communication; I felt there was no respect toward me. I was trying to get my design business established, was paying a mortgage, my wife wanted to take time off to parent the child, so there was just one income, and all that stuff had to be paid for.
“Following several attempts at discussing the seriousness of the situation we tried counselling. The situation continued to deteriorate; communication completely broke down. At the time it was probably obvious to all parties that it couldn’t go on, and everybody was frightened. So from there it went to the legal situation.

“I approached the thing initially without trepidation. My first mistake was to assume that my wife would share custody because the strength of the bond that existed between my child and myself was so obvious, and because the responsibilities of running the household had fallen to me.

“But in my meetings with various solicitors that I dealt with, my impression was that all these people state the mantra that everything will be done in the best interests of the child, as if that was paramount in the legal profession and the judiciary – my first solicitor actually told me he’d rather be my wife’s solicitor – because the foregone conclusion was that the child should reside primarily with the mother.
“I think in most cases this is the outcome, although there are rare cases where the father has custody. I certainly didn’t come out from any of these interviews feeling encouraged to continue. In fact, if I weren’t the person I am, I would’ve just given up after the first interview, even though I had been the one who kept the domestic situation going and even though there had been negligence and problems with drink on her side, as well as depression. It took me a while to find someone to handle the case, who had the fight in them.
“Then I started getting these solicitor’s letters which were shocking, using words like ‘bullying’ and basically telling me what was going to happen, that I should leave the home, everything prefaced with ‘in the best interests of the child’. I would almost be paralysed; that was the effect they had on me. They were so wrong, ill-considered, confrontational; they were an assault. But you bring them to your legal person and they’re quite detached, they aren’t interested in any of that detail. You’re completely in the hands of the solicitors, and that applies to both parties.
“Mine screwed things up. There was a need for a child psychologist’s report. Different names were put forward and I agreed to see a particular child psychologist, a man who had been recommended by her team. He did his report and it was quite favourable to me. My wife’s legal team found fault with it and demanded a second report.

“My solicitors had failed to communicate with the original child psychologist that he was needed in court – and so a second child psychologist was appointed, this time a woman. When I met her, I felt that her line of enquiry was hostile and even provocative. There were serious factual errors and selective omissions in her report. She painted a picture effectively but if you knew the facts the report was full of prejudice and spin.
“And my solicitors had effectively acquiesced in this; it was their mistake which allowed it to happen and it was critical to the way everything turned out – which wasn’t as favourable to me as might have been the case.
“My advice to mothers and fathers would be to, as much as you can, draft letters yourself and review what’s being sent, because the attention to detail is not there. I’ve had letters sent and received letters that basically got the facts wrong, which I think is an appalling lack of diligence.
“The legal process went on for about two and a half years, and both of us were damaged by the process. In the end, my wife and I spoke prior to the court date, and I communicated what I thought would be a fair settlement that honoured us both. There was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, but we arrived at a state of being willing to make a deal. We were tenderised by that stage. From a process where, in the beginning, a settlement was going to be dictated to me in no uncertain terms, we reached a compromise that I think was fair to everybody in the end, and was definitely the best for our child.

“But on the big day of court you always notice that the legal people are quite relaxed because everybody’s been battered into a state of, ‘Let’s get this fucking thing over with’. And what’s remarkable is, maybe it’s a sartorial thing, but when the solicitors arrive festooned in gold and diamonds, you do kind of think that it’s insensitive to say the least, given that you’ve no money and have lost your business, as I had when all this torture came to an end.

“I would be very critical about the legal profession and the lack of sensitivity in dealing with the tender equation of a family, particularly a young family, that is in the process of disintegrating. The process of being in a legal separation consumes your life, unless you happen to be the one in a very, very strong position. In some ways your very essence is under attack. Because of the way the legal system works, it’s a war.
“But what I think is important for anyone going through this process, is to try and have as much control as you can. Don’t be intimidated by solicitors. Demand that your questions are answered. People shouldn’t underestimate their own common sense.”

Click here for Peter Murphy's Idiot's Guide To Fatherhood.