'Dad of four jailed for contempt", stated the headline on the front of last week's Enniscorthy Echo.
The report underneath represents a shocking indictment of Irish society, its family court system and the double standard at the heart of our culture with regard to families, fathers and children. It also raises a number of important issues concerning our evolving attitudes towards marriage.
The substance of the story was that the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had been jailed for refusing to recognise a court's jurisdiction over his marriage and refusing to comply with an order directing that a number of his children should live with his wife while the others continued to live with him.
He was jailed and sent to Limerick Prison, where he stayed until Tuesday last when he was brought back to court. On refusing to purge his contempt he was sent back to jail.
A family member told the Echo that the man was prepared to stay in jail rather than allow his children to be split up. "It is our understanding," he said, "that nobody can be forced to enter into family law proceedings involuntarily."
Roger Eldridge, of the National Men's Council of Ireland, was quoted as asserting that this case was "the culmination of various discriminatory laws that made it an absurdity waiting to happen".
Mr Eldridge said that, because the man's faith does not permit him to recognise the dissolution of his marriage, he does not wish to take part in judicial proceedings. In that event, Mr Eldridge suggested, a judge has the power to issue default orders but not to have the non-appearing party arrested and forced to participate in proceedings with which he disagrees. A number of things jump out from this account. Firstly, it is obvious that the man at the centre of this lamentable situation takes a clear and conscientious view of his marital and family situations. Whatever the legal validity of the issues he raises, it is dismaying that the only response of this society is to lock him up.
Is it conceivable that a woman, never mind a mother with children to care for, would be treated in this way? My understanding is that, at the time he was jailed, this father, having been deserted by his wife, was caring alone for all his children. One of the most intractable difficulties in family law is the system's inability to force recalcitrant mothers to obey orders for contact between fathers and children, because the courts are reluctant to use the only available remedy - imprisonment - against a mother with children to care for.
Yet, in a case where an otherwise unimpeachable citizen has raised an important legal and cultural issue on which he believes he has clear legal standing, he ends up being jailed with all of the consequences of this for his children.
Since the introduction of civil divorce, there is now no means by which a citizen can elect to get married for life.
Catholic marriages are beset by the extraordinary anomaly that, whereas they take place under canon law jurisdiction which demands lifelong commitment, the civil marriage which takes place at the same time and in the same building is deemed to exist for only as long as both parties desire. Far from being cast into jail, it seems to me that this man deserves to be congratulated for raising vital matters relating to marriage and society.
It is disquieting that the law and its agencies now appear to operate on behalf of those seeking to collapse marriages rather than those seeking to defend them. But there are deeper issues. Is it appropriate, for example, that the Catholic Church continues to allow the ratification of the civil dimensions of a marriage at the same time and in the same building as the church wedding?
Among the many problems associated with this conjunction is the confusion generated by the conflicting religious and civil contracts, with marriage continuing to hold, by virtue of its Catholic connotation, a cultural sense of permanence that the law now operates to undermine. At the very least there is in this a denial of moral and religious freedom to devout Catholics who are no longer enabled by civil law to enter into marriage contracts which accord with their beliefs.