OPINION:MY FIRST play, Long Black Coat, staged by Bickerstaffe in Kilkenny 15 years ago, was about fatherhood, though I was childless at the time. It was a dialogue between "Jody", the father of a boy he didn't see, and "Old Man", Jody's father, about how this situation came about. The characters were invented, but the play was based on things I had become aware were happening around me. For some years, I had been meeting men like Jody, who had children they hardly ever saw, as a result of decisions made in family law courts.
One such man had been married with children, of whom he had been the primary carer until his wife announced that she was “bored” with him and he was ordered to leave his home and the presence of his beloved children. A DIY fetishist, he would describe to me in loving detail how he had built the house he was now refused permission to enter. He lived in a bedsit and at the weekends was allowed to take his children out for a few hours. He would beep outside and wait, being forbidden to go inside the gate.
My initial response was that such stories must be exaggerations, that these men were spinning to conceal something. But, in the frequency and consistency of the accounts, there emerged a different impression. Soon I found myself anticipating what such men would tell me before they opened their mouths.
Later on, I had my own experience of family courts, here and in England. Because of the in camera rule, which forbids discussion of family law cases, I cannot speak of those experiences, but I do say that very little I encountered reassured me about the quality of justice in either jurisdiction. Thirteen years ago, I tentatively started writing about these matters, tiptoeing between the law and the truth. I was thereafter inundated with the stories of men who told of being brutalised in a manner suggestive of China under Mao rather than Ireland under Reynolds, Bruton and Ahern. Once aware of what these men had experienced, it would have been bizarre and wrong not to bear witness to what I knew.
I began to find ways of writing about what I was hearing, sometimes by extracting the essence of a story and changing key details, sometimes by the use of rhetoric and polemic. The more I wrote, the more men contacted me. Since 1996, I have sat in cafes with hundreds of such men, and watched them weep. Their number included one of Ireland’s most acclaimed artists, two psychologists, probably our finest contemporary traditional musician, a lawyer, and several men who had come here from allegedly less-developed societies and found themselves more brutalised in this democracy than in their nightmares back home. Often, too, I have met women – older women who had watched the lives of their sons shredded by something calling itself the law, or younger women whose lovers were reduced to husks before their eyes.
A few women contacted me claiming they too were victims of family law bias, but invariably their complaints seemed to centre on the fact that their husbands were still walking around with shirts on their backs.
I mention this because a number of people this week have drawn my attention to a report in this newspaper on Friday last, in which the former Supreme Court judge Catherine McGuinness, speaking at a book launch, suggested that the public view of the family courts has been coloured by “rumour, hearsay and media commentary”. The report cited her as saying: “Much of the commentary was ill-informed and, at least in some cases, coloured by the personal prejudices of the writer.” Several people have suggested to me that, since I am the only commentator they can think of who has written consistently and critically about the family courts, McGuinness must have been talking about me.
I have been able to reassure them that this is not so.
Firstly, McGuinness would not be well placed to know what motivates my writing. As I have outlined, anything I have written about family courts has been motivated by an empathy with other men, whose stories have converged in a coherent and consistent pattern over the years. I have written about this subject on the same basis journalists write about anything: by talking to people and testing what they say against my reason and what I can ascertain of the facts. I had not a paragraph’s worth of prejudices to begin with.
McGuinness and I are on nodding terms, having met a couple of times in radio studios to debate other matters. Once she presided over a High Court hearing where I was the applicant (she granted the order). But we have never discussed my views of family courts and she has not sought to question or debate my writings in public.
Citizens, of course, may form opinions about what they read in newspapers. But the fact that McGuinness was previously a judge reassures me that she would not jump to a conclusion without considering the facts.
It is obvious to me, therefore, that she was thinking of someone else.