State's family policy adds to child poverty warns social researcher

Family policy in this country "adds to child poverty and to family poverty in very real ways," one of the State's most prominent social researchers has said.

Dr Kieran McKeown, addressing a conference on lone fatherhood yesterday, also said the way the State intervened in families "does not help the management of conflict" and that recent comments by the Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Mr Brennan, about absent fathers were "humiliating".

The conference, entitled Being a Father at Christmas, was organised by the Amen organisation, which lobbies on behalf of, and supports, lone fathers. It was supported by the Department of Social and Family Affairs.

As well as contributions from fathers who were excluded from their children's lives, there were addresses from journalist John Waters and Mr Pat Bennett, chief executive of the Family Support Agency.

Dr McKeown said that the proportion of children not living with their fathers now stood at 25 per cent and this was increasing as the incidence of marriage breakdown rose.

It was vital that statutory agencies changed their approach to be more inclusive of fathers, if more damage to children and fathers was to be prevented, he said.

"Most services for families are targeted at mothers and children," he said. "There needs to be a positive focus on how parenting can be done by parents who do not live together." He particularly referred to the family courts, to the lone-parents payment system that disincentives mothers from living with their children's fathers, as well as to social work systems, which, he said, tended to exclude fathers.

"I thought comment by the Minister at the weekend was humiliating, reducing the role of lone fathers to one of absent breadwinner," he added.

Mr Brennan last week reiterated warnings by his Department that court cases were pending against absent fathers who failed to pay support maintenance.

Chairing the conference, Mr Pat O'Connor, a solicitor and former president of the Law Society, said the adversarial nature of the Family Courts did a disservice to families, pitting spouses against each other.

"There has been the tribunalisation of so many areas, the employment area for instance. If one- tenth of the effort that is put into other areas was put into the way family disputes were dealt with, families would be in a far better position."

John Waters said if the "injustices perpetrated against fathers" by the family law systems "were perpetrated against Jews, Travellers, homosexuals or blacks, there would be nothing else being talked about. This is one of the most outrageous human rights abuses being perpetrated.

"State policy up to now has been to assist mothers in maximising their ability to push fathers out of their children's lives altogether. This is not just about my rights, my child's right. This is about everybody."

He said fathers who had lost access to their children could not help but be "bitter and angry and twisted, when we know what's going on".

Minister Séamus Brennan, who opened the conference, said society "should be re-examining our attitudes to fathers and their role in the family".

"It is clear we need to ensure the system does not, as a matter of routine, discriminate against fathers when the issue of custody is being addressed."