When I was an editor, I used to hate when rights-of-reply started out: “Sir, (nowadays, of course, it’s all ‘Madam’) The article by X in your edition of blah-blah was so full of evasions, misrepresentations and distortions that I don’t know where to begin”. You’ve already begun, you plonker, I would mutter to myself, before soldiering on. But now I find myself having to write that the article hotpress published last issue by Ivana Bacik was so full of evasions, misrepresentations and distortions (EMDs) that I’m afraid that if I start I won’t know when to finish.
I will confine myself to one point, which in a way goes to the heart of all her EMDs, and reveals in quite a spectacular way the dishonesty of her position. Ms Bacik, in attacking me and “like-minded contrarians”, bemoans what she describes as our tendency to personalise things by attacking “feminists” among whom she appears to include herself. “It often seems to me as if the main enemy for these angry fathers is not the family courts at all; but rather feminism”, she writes.
The first time I ever heard of Ivana Bacik was about five years ago when I turned on my radio one Sunday morning and heard her pontificating about issues relating to my personal situation as father of my own child. Also present in studio that morning was a certain individual with an unacknowledged interest in spreading malicious and mischievous falsehoods about me. Taking her cue from him, and based on zero knowledge of what she was talking about, Ms Bacik proceeded to assume the truth and validity of everything that had been said, and then went on to question my right to speak publicly about the discrimination suffered by fathers, describing me inter alia as “dangerous”.
So, yes, this is all a bit personal. But in an interesting way, this peculiar particularity goes also to the more generalised attempt by Ivana Bacik to suggest that, by raising the issue of what the family courts do to fathers and children, fathers are in some way attacking feminists. When I first began to write about these issues – as I’ve said many, many times – I assumed “feminists” would agree with me. The integration in a holistic way of the working, public, domestic and personal lives of men and women had been, after all, among the objectives of the Founding Sisters. But instead, when I began to tell of the abominations I had encountered, the actually existing sisterhood, including a then almost unheard-of Ivana Bacik, began to attack me.
Occasionally I replied, and with an ever more weary feeling, still occasionally do. That, as far as I am concerned, is the only relevance of feminism to this issue, a relevance perhaps best expressed in the question: “Why are (some) feminists still continuing to oppose the extension of full humanity to fathers and their children?” The answers have to do with money, ideology and spite.
The solution to the present obscenities of family law are actually very simple. All that is required is that society establish as a first principle the idea that children have an equal right to the society, love, care and protection of both their mothers and fathers, and working from there, create structures whereby the State, instead of using its forces to drive parents further apart, would henceforth help them to heal their personal difficulties and move towards the next phase of their parenting relationship. This could involve a range of prescribed options in relations to joint custody, all embracing the fundamental princiiple of equal treatment, ranging from 50/50 to, perhaps, 70/30, to be agreed on the basis of the particular needs of any given case. There should then be the option of training, advice and assistance for parents in finding and developing the model best suited to their situation. This would dramatically reduce the numbers of cases in which legal intervention was required. But it would also, of course, mean that members of Ivana Bacik’s profession would no longer grow fat off the misery of Irish families.
To tell the truth, I question Ivana Bacik’s right to participate in this debate at all. The idea that there is some countervailing argument to that posited in this context by myself, Bob Geldof and others is a bit like suggesting that slave traders have a right to defend their right to buy and sell their fellow human beings against the claims of the slave that they beset free. And what is particularly galling is that it is mainly career “feminists”, frequently themselves childless, who seek to intervene in this debate in the most reactionary way.
There is something obscene about having to debate with someone like this the issue of whether or not I and my child have a right to ask this society to treat us as full human beings. I usually refuse to do it, but then I see that the media appear more interested in the self-serving reactionary EMDs of the pecuniarily and ideologically interested than in the truth about these grotesque abuses of human rights, and I think, as Bob might have it: fook off.
Ms Bacik wrote: “It is strange that this kind of rhetoric [ie the rhetoric of those seeking to highlight the present injustices] is always about ‘fathers’rights’ - never fathers’ responsibilities, nor indeed children’s rights”.
This, in what purported to be a response to my article in the previous edition, in which the following sentence appeared: “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”. To say that anyone has suggested that “fathers’ rights” are separate from either fathers’ responsibilities or children’s rights is fatuously untrue.
But why bother with the truth when half-truths and weasel words are more useful to your case. Ms Bacik, speaking of course, as a lawyer, states that the courts must decide “in the best interests of the child”. Surely, she demands, “the rights of both mother and father must always give way to this fundamental principle”. Actually, as evidenced by the fact that it is all but invariably the rights of the father that are required to “give way”, this “fundamental principle” is a nest of weasel words, designed to validate a corrupt, abusive and secretive system. Yes, “upholding the right of the child” is what the courts, the judges, the “experts” and the spokespeople for the entrenched family law interests claim that they do. The reality, as the coming years will tell, is of the utter destruction of the security and happiness of children, based on ignorance, prejudice and lies - and all, ultimately, in a quite unnecessary way.
I repeat: the solution is simple – a principle of default 50/50 custody subject to negotiation in individual circumstances, with flexibility to alter arrangements as parental circumstances and children’s needs dictate. The simplicity of the solution, together with the truth of the present abuses, injustices and corruptions, is increasingly being accepted in other societies. The UK government, for example, will shortly undertake a complete overhaul of its family law procedures. We, of course, given our propensity for mindless imitation, will eventually do the same. The thing is that, if we could stop listening to the chauvinistic voices of the night, we could quite creatively and radically bolster our image as a nation that truly values its children. If we could move the discussion away from the reactionary path dictated by Ivana Bacik and her surviving band of mutant-feminist, flat-earthist neanderthals, we might well show the rest of the world what, in a decent, modern society, is meant by family values.