The public outrage at the jailing of John Marques for non-payment of child support was interesting. For many years myself and others have been seeking to draw attention to the grotesque abuses of human rights perpetrated daily by our system of family law, but it takes the incarceration of a father in the aftermath of the brutal murder of a prisoner in Mountjoy for the media and the public to start smelling the coffee, writes John Waters.
Mr Marques, having been released on bail, is appealing a prison sentence handed down by a family court on July 28th in relation to an order requiring him to pay €1,500 a month to his ex-wife and her three children out of his monthly income of €2,000.
He says he cannot afford this amount and since he is the biological father of only one of the children, believes he should not have to pay for the others.
Ray Kelly of Separated & Unmarried Fathers of Ireland, which raised the bail for Mr Marques, spoke of the appalling conditions in Mountjoy, where Mr Marques was held for nine days: "There were flies. There was dirt. He slept for two nights on the floor. There were 14 people held in the cell with him. We feared for his safety given what has happened in Mountjoy in recent days."
Raising the issue of prison conditions was a clever PR tactic, capitalising on recent outrage. The state of Irish prisons is a serious indictment of our pretensions to being a modern state, but, while these conditions may seem more shocking when presented in the case of an "innocent" man, or even a man jailed alongside hardened criminals because of a legitimately disputed debt of a few hundred euro, their chief relevance to this case is that they enabled the public gaze to focus briefly on a rather typical example of the brutality of family courts.
It is, of course, barbaric that a man can be jailed in these circumstances, but it is not unusual. Fathers are routinely jailed for non-payment of child maintenance by courts (and these orders are often made by courts which decline to impose sanctions on mothers who sabotage contact between fathers and children).
It seems almost pointless bringing this double-standard to public notice again. And it is, of course, outrageous that a man is ordered to hand over three-quarters of his income to a woman who no longer lives with him, by a court which takes no view as to how this man might continue to feed, house and clothe himself. But such things are news only to those who have been throwing their eyes up to heaven for a decade whenever anyone talked about the evils of family law. There are men like Mr Marques every day of the week whose suffering never comes to public notice because they are not media savvy or because the in camera rule, which ostensibly exists to protect them and their families, is used to protect a system which brutalises them. But the Marques case has a particularly interesting dimension in the context of what purports to be a "non-judgmental" family law system.
For what the case demonstrates above all else is that, as the system bends ever further backwards to accommodate the "lifestyle choices" of women, men are being criminalised because the system doesn't know what else to do.
The ex-wife of Mr Marques had two children, with two different men, before she met him. She had also been married before, to a foreign national who was not the father of either of these children, but who adopted them both in the course of their marriage.
When this marriage broke up, this man returned to his native country, where an order for maintenance has been issued in respect of the two children for whom he is legally responsible.
Mr Marques fathered a child with the mother of these two children but did not himself adopt them, and therefore can have no legal responsibility for maintaining them. He can be held legally responsible for his own child and he has no difficulty with that.
There was a time when a woman who behaved in the manner of Mr Marques's ex-wife would have been subject to severe judgment by this society and its institutions on what would have been characterised as "moral" grounds.
All this has changed as a result of the ideological wars of recent decades, and we are inclined to see this as evidence of progress. But if we are no longer permitted to judge a woman on these terms, it is surely wrong that our society and its institutions are disposed to judge on the double a man who wanders into the same frame.
A court, bedevilled by what Michael McDowell once described as the "legal slum" of family law, and charged with ensuring that children do not become a burden on the State, has brought its judgment and frustration heavily down on the head of a hapless man.