DADDY always says goodbye. He stands at the gate, the door, the top of the stairs and smilingly waves day day. He walks a little down the road, the path, the stairs, and turns to wave again. Daddy always leaves. Yes, he will return again soon but his life is not of this place. He is of the world outside, a part of his child's life but also apart from it. It has always been like this, but now it is more so.
I call it Raidio Roisin, the baby monitor that I place near my daughter's cot to check on her when she is asleep. It reminds me of my own father, her now dead grandfather, who seemed to answer the description of a traditional patriarch in a long black coat. It strikes me that it would have been an ideal way to check at night on whether he was still breathing, rather than crouching at the bedroom door with my ear to the keyhole, listening for reassuring sounds of life. He was always leaving too, which is perhaps why I worried so. He would leave in the early hours of the morning to go, as I now understand, a hunting. My fear was mixed with guilt on this account, for the dangers he faced were faced in part for me. Although as a child I feared for both parents, I feared mostly for him because he was not there.
My father left his children's presence because he had to the modern father leaves his child behind because he has no right not to. His authority cannot derive from what he earns or what he gives.
Although I did not know it at the time, my fears for my father's welfare had a solid basis in reality. Although he lived to be nearly 84 he beat the bookies in doing so. Surveys in the US have shown that in the past 75 years or so the gap between the life expectancies of men and women has widened remarkably. In 1920, women lived on average one year longer than men, today they live seven years longer.
There is undoubtedly a connection between this and the marginalisation of men in what should be their primary function. As the man's traditional breadwinning role is gradually rendered obsolete by changing work patterns, the absence of any understanding of what else he did is leading many men to question their existence in the most fundamental way.
Men have no one to blame but themselves. This is something extreme feminists have a tendency to observe but it contains a literal truth which I do not believe is part of their intention. In a world which makes much of the oppression of women and nothing at all of the oppression of men four times as many men commit suicide as do women. In the past 25 years, the suicide rate among men has increased by one quarter, while the rate among women has decreased by one third. Women blame a man, some men, or men in general. Men are faced with their own reflection in the glass ceiling and over their heads a giant question mark hangs like a noose.
Today's man is told that he is powerful, an oppressor, and so he believes that's what he must be, while feeling nothing of the kind. There is such a gap between his experience of the world and what he is told about it, that he can perceive this gap only as a measure of his own individual failure and inadequacy. If everyone says that men are guilty, then they must be.
Whether we like it or not the issue focuses on different forms of power. In a world revolutionised by feminism men find their economic power shrinking in inverse proportion to the growth in the economic power of women. But instead of the hoped for holy grail of equality, what is occurring is an even more spectacular form of inequality. In the dim, distant days before the dawn of modern enlightenment, the alleged freedom of men was no more unequivocal than the unfreedom of women. The problem is not feminism or the gains of the women's movement; it is the failure to understand that there was more to the previous reality than meets the thoroughly modern eye.
Since the areas of female power were never defined as such but as evidence of women's martyrdom or enslavement, the transition from patriarchy is depositing both external and domestic forms of power into the domain of the woman and leaving a big question mark where the role of men used to be. Since it was never understood, even by men, that man's economic role was actually to do with his parenthood, this question hangs most ominously over the role of fatherhood. A woman can work as well as a man but a man can campaign until doomsday and never get to have a womb.
The modern world is attuned to any signs of sexism against women but sexism against men is neither recognised nor acknowledged. There are few more glaring examples of sexism in the modern world than the treatment of fathers by the legal system.
Fathers, unlike mothers, have no, antecedent rights by virtue of parenthood. If the reverse were true it would be a national scandal but for the moment those who seek to address it are swimming against a tide of taboos.
As with many problems, the legal difficulties facing the modern Irish father begin with the Constitution, which does not confer any specific rights on fathers vis a vis their children, nor on children vis a vis their fathers. The constitutional provisions in respect of the family give some protection to married fathers but even these rights are in practice considered inferior to those of the mother. Moreover, the law effectively operates on a no-fault basis - which is to say that, even when the mother is to "blame" for the breakdown, she retains full rights and entitlements to the home and children. Almost invariably she gets possession of the family home which the father must continue to subsidise without retaining any right of access, even though it is the home of his children. The best a father can hope for is "reasonable" access, amounting to perhaps a few hours a week usually taking the form of drives, walks or the fabled trip to McDonalds. A live in boyfriend of the mother often acquires de facto fatherhood of the children. Married fathers have limited rights but unmarried fathers even less.
Because I remain on good terms with her mother I see my daughter regularly but this is far from being the typical situation.
The judgment some years ago in the Keegan case, in which an Irish man gained the right in the European Court for unmarried fathers to be consulted before their children were put up for adoption, has not yet been incorporated into Irish law. The position in our domestic law remains as stated in the case of K versus W 1990, which confirmed that Section 6A of the 1964 Guardianship of Infants Act does not confer on a natural father the automatic right to be guardian of his child. The Chief Justice said in that case that the extent and character of rights arising from the relationship of a father to his child in the event that he is not married should vary according to the circumstances in each individual case.
The effect of this is that the mother can define the situation according to her own wishes and convenience. If she wishes to define the relationship as a short term one, thereby excluding the father, she has the power to do this. If, on the other hand, she wishes to pursue the father for maintenance, she can do this also, while still seriously curtailing his rights of access. There have been many cases of the mother having it both ways excluding the father for a lengthy period and then seeking and obtaining retrospective maintenance for herself and the child. Unless an unmarried father - and there's an increasing amount of them - has obtained guardian ship of his children, he has no particular rights in the event of the death of the mother and may have to fight the mother's family for custody.
However, Section 6A of the 1964 Act does give unmarried fathers the right to apply to a court to be appointed as a guardian. The court has full discretion in this matter and is theoretically supposed to regard the welfare of the child as the first and paramount consideration. In practice, the wishes and convenience of the mother get precedence. In breakdown situations, men married or unmarried - are given custody in only the most extreme circumstances. The concept of joint custody, though gaining ground, has a long way to go before it is accepted, a plausible resolution.
More than 90 per cent of cases result in the mother obtaining full custody. Since the mother is the one with whom the child resides, the court effectively confers on her, the right to decide if and when contact will occur between the father and the child or children.
Since most breakdowns occur in acrimonious circumstances, a frequent outcome is that children are in effect held hostage by the mother id her dealings with the father. If she becomes unhappy with his performance or behaviour, irrespective of the basis of her unhappiness, she has the power to punish and banish. A court will make an order in respect of visitation rights but a mother who seeks to frustrate this can do so. She can say, on any given day, that a child is unwell and turn the father away from the door. He is then faced with having to undertake further expensive and adversarial legal proceedings in order to restore what has been summarily taken away from him.
A mother has the power to say to the father of her children, "I will decide whether you know your child or not" and he has no option but to accept this as an accurate summation of the legal situation. A father's best hope is to throw himself at the mercy of the mother and rely on her goodwill. If this is not forthcoming he may as well walk away and wait until his children come to seek him out. A growing number of men are taking up this option, leading to further propaganda victories for those wishing to present men as feckless and unloving.
The overall problem is the result of an unhappy combination of bad law and a culture heavily biased in favour of mothers, with no comprehension at all of what the role of a father might be. Feeding off old wives prejudices and political "correctness", the culture seems to presume that men are, by nature, delinquent and reluctant when it comes to direct responsibility for children. The rights of the mother are therefore considered to be synonymous with those of the child.
Fathering is considered an "optional extra", a kind of service which should ideally be made available at the mother's discretion, like piano lessons or judo.