First, an apology to readers. I know that nothing is more irritating to you than the incestuous squabbles of newspaper columnists, especially when they work for the same paper. There's a big world out there and the small world of media pundits isn't even an interesting microcosm. For that reason, I've tried to avoid using this space to reply to other columnists. I do so now only because John Waters's column yesterday makes my silence on certain matters its central issue. When silence is used as a weapon, there is a need to speak.
The basis of John's attack is that I have not written in the past about the sufferings of men at the hands of the family court system or about the epidemic of suicide among Irish men. This is true. I strongly believe that, in the absence of good explanations, silence is infinitely preferable to bad ones.
The key point about the family court system is that neither I nor John Waters nor anyone else has any objective information on how it is operating. Because cases are conducted in camera, there is no outside scrutiny. John and the groups he supports feel strongly that the family courts systematically discriminate against men.
Perhaps they do. Or perhaps the very nature of what they deal with is such that almost everyone who goes through the system ends up feeling bruised, misused and angry. Family breakdown is a lose/lose situation. The thing that everyone started out with - a loving relationship that finds fulfilment in the raising of secure, well-grounded children - is no longer on offer.
The courts can't fix what has been broken. The law is a blunt instrument, striking at the most tender parts of people's lives. That any group of men and women who have been through the system will feel lost, hurt and enraged is not surprising. To assume without further evidence that the hurt of aggrieved fathers is the full story, however, is to take a huge rhetorical leap beyond the available evidence. What's needed for a rational debate is the kind of objective scrutiny that will be possible only if the system becomes far more transparent than it is.
In the meantime, the temptation to fill the gaps left by the absence of evidence with mere assertion should be avoided, especially when the assertions contradict themselves.
John's argument about the appalling incidence of child murders in Ireland at the moment consists of essentially two parts. One is that men are being driven to kill their children by the injustices they suffer at the hands of the family courts. The other is that mothers kill even more children than fathers do.
He does not seem to notice that these two arguments cancel each other out. If it is unjust family courts that cause the men to kill their children, then the allegedly higher incidence of women killing their children must be caused by even greater injustice in the courts. A system could conceivably operate gender discrimination against either men or women. It could not conceivably discriminate against both at the same time.
It is perhaps the inherent absurdity of this argument that leads John into simple factual errors. He wrote yesterday, for example, that "the vast majority of infanticides are perpetrated by mothers, who are rarely charged with this crime because there is an understanding that it is the act of a person of unsound mind." This is wrong on both counts. All infanticides are committed by mothers, for the simple reason that infanticide is defined specifically as the killing by its mother of an infant of less than 12 months. A defence of unsound mind arises after someone has been charged, not before, and is in any case open to both men and women.
The strain also shows in a resort to the kind of argument that has not been heard since the heyday of pseudo-sciences like phrenology and eugenics. Recently, for example, John claimed that "boys are genetically more disposed than girls to achieve academically" because "on average, men's brains are 15 per cent larger than women's".
And since orang-utans have bigger brains than humans, they are presumably more disposed to academic achievement than we are.
It really is not useful to fill in the gaps where evidence and knowledge should be with a vast conspiracy theory in which men as a gender are being systematically abused by a pro-feminist elite which, it turns out from yesterday's column, is made up not merely of men but of "men who think like Fintan O'Toole". The enemy, then, is not women, but men who, for some unstated reason, hate themselves.
This strange breed, to which I apparently belong, is behind a vast array of misdeeds which includes not just the systematic corruption of the family courts but also a relentless campaign of anti-male propaganda in the mass media and a plot to ensure that boys perform badly at school.
If this is true, then it is a sensational story and I expect the next issue of Magill magazine to give us a blow-by-blow account of how this conspiracy operates. Otherwise, we can assume that it is just another piece of wildly inflated, and increasingly dangerous, rhetoric of a kind that serves men, women and especially children, very badly indeed.
fotoole@irish-times.ie