Zipping up the loopholes on fly-by-night fathers

Do deadbeat fathers rule? Three out of 10 Irish children are born outside marriage. And most lone mothers receive no support from the fathers of their children, according to Cherish, the organisation for lone parents.

So that makes recent news from Wisconsin relevant. David Oakley (34), who fathered nine children with four women and failed to pay child support, has been ordered by a Wisconsin Supreme Court to stop procreating or face eight years in prison. It's about time, many people are saying.

Serial fathers who impregnate and then disappear, cost taxpayers money. They condemn their casual, see-you-sometime families to poverty and, worst of all, they deprive their children of constructive fathering.

By the time the Wisconsin judicial system told David Oakley to keep it zipped, he owed $25,000 in child support and had repeatedly ignored court orders to pay up. Now, if he doesn't pay, he will go to prison for eight years.

That's unheard of in this State where Anne O'Neill, solicitor with Gallagher Shatter, says she has seen only one case in 11 years of a father going to prison for refusing to pay maintenance.

Irresponsible Irish fathers are getting an easy ride - in more ways than one - because, in O'Neill's words: "The courts take a soft view on family law and are not imposing the penalties available. We do have a system for enforcing the payment of child support, but half the time it is not used. And when it is used, there is a high level of default.

"If the word goes out in the pubs and clubs that it won't happen to you, then you won't take the law seriously. It's a real problem - there is no sense of respect that the system will grind into place if you don't do what the courts want you to do," she says.

Women may be at fault too, she adds, because when women refuse to co-operate with custody orders, denying the fathers their rights, there are no penalties for them either.

"I have a real sympathy for men in these situations, who sometimes feel that all that is wanted from them is their money. So they get browned off and start defaulting," she says.

Irishmen who father children serially with different mothers certainly exist, but they are in the minority, says Carol Glennon of Gingerbread, an organisation for lone parents.

"(Oakley) isn't only hurting his children, he is giving a bad name to all men who are lone parents and want to be there for their children. He is making it harder for responsible men to get the custody rights they deserve," she says.

"There are a lot of men who could only see their children on a Sunday for a couple of hours and would love to see more of them. Women have this idea that all men are the same and blacken them all with the same brush."

Men who want to act like fathers, not just breed like them, deserve support. Women should not be allowed to cut them out of their children's lives - as much for their children's sakes as for the fathers'. However, let's not romanticise it: most single fathers are not supporting their children.

Muriel Wall, family lawyer with McCann Fitzgerald, doesn't see how an Irish court could impose or even enforce the kind of sanction Wisconsin justices served up.

And Anne O'Neill agrees with the three women justices who opposed the ruling: "I can see how in exasperation you would say, `that man should have his pecker slung around his neck and tied in a bow', but hard cases don't make good law.

"Down the line you may be saying poor people can't procreate. It seems to me the women, in opposing, showed greater ethical and visionary sense. Yes, it is the mothers who suffer, but if you say poor people can't have children, a greater wrong would be done in a universal way."

Bizarrely, this State seems to encourage the Oakley attitude among men. The onus is on lone mothers to prise support out of the men who impregnated them. According to Cherish, several factors discourage mothers from doing this.

If a woman is getting a lone parent allowance, she receives a letter telling her that the State assumes that by accepting the allowance, she has made all reasonable efforts to seek maintenance. But unless the father voluntarily contributes maintenance, the mother must drag him into court, with all the financial and emotional pressure that entails.

If his name is not on the birth certificate (and it's very likely not, because single fathers are named on birth certs only if they accompany the mother to the register office) the mother has to pay for DNA testing at £500 a go. What if she can't afford it?

If a single mother receives the lone parent allowance but does not qualify for rent allowance (which most single mothers do not because they live with their parents), she will, from April 2001, have her parent allowance cut by 50 per cent of the amount the father of her child pays.

If she is getting both allowances, rent and parent, and the father contributes, she will have both her allowances reduced.

Look at it this way: why bother to track down the father (if you know who he is), drag him through court and DNA testing, if all you're going to get from him is a few pounds which are going to be taken out of your allowance anyway? Many women prefer to keep what they view as their independence, by remaining dependent on the State.

Among those unhappy with the onus on the mother to seek maintenance is Karen Kiernan, Cherish manager. "We are not aware of any woman who has been penalised so far, but it could happen."

One intriguing aspect of the Wisconsin case is that the court split four to three along gender lines.

The four male justices favoured ordering Oakley to keep his reproductive urges to himself, while the three female justices disagreed. They opposed the ruling as an unconstitutional intrusion on a basic right to procreate.

The courts have no right to tell poor people not to have children, the women justices believed. And the same law that tells the Oakleys of this world to keep their pants on, could encourage men in his situation to advise their pregnant girlfriends to have abortions.

Already, some US states are, controversially, telling single mothers on welfare that their allowances will be cut if they have more children. Surely, if a woman has children with various irresponsible fathers, she has a case to answer too?

Carol Glennon, of Gingerbread, thinks so. A single mother of one, she believes that any woman would be irresponsible to have more than one child with a man who has refused to pay child support.

She also thinks women should refuse to have even one child with a man who has fathered previous children he isn't helping to support.

But then, in the era of the anonymous serial father, how does she know?

kholmquist@irish-times.ie