Most people would see the justice in the Mr G judgment. Some time ago, his partner took their two-year-old twins to England. As an unmarried father who did not apply for guardianship, Mr G appeared to have no rights, writes Breda O'Brien.
However, he has been pressing for their return, and this week the High Court found in his favour. The application was made under the terms of the Hague Convention, and the judgment does not grant blanket rights to unmarried fathers.
Margot Doherty of Treoir, the National Federation of Services for Unmarried Parents and their Children, said the situation was a "wake-up call" for many men. Men should apply for guardianship as early as possible, and not wait for something to go wrong. The Treoir leaflet on unmarried fathers' rights is stark. In response to the question, "What are my legal rights with respect to my child?", the answer is "none". Merely registering the father's name on the birth certificate does not confer any rights, unless men apply for guardianship.
Situations like the one faced by Mr G generate renewed calls for a change in the definition of family in the Constitution. Rarely, if ever, does it trigger a debate on whether the increasing drift towards living together rather than marriage is a good thing.
Couples who live together are much more likely to break up. One factor may be that the same level of commitment is not there. If so, couples should think seriously about introducing children to the relationship. In Britain, a trend has been noted in cohabiting couples. Formerly, having a child prompted a couple to choose marriage. Now, a child is more likely to expose hidden fault lines in a relationship, and cause the break-up of the relationship.
The Iona Institute (of which I am a patron) held a seminar this week called The Fragmenting Family. The title is brave in itself, as the preferred term these days is family diversity.
Dr Brenda Almond, the author of a book entitled Fragmenting Family, was a speaker at the conference.
In her address, she said: "The idea has taken root that human families can be constructed or put together in any way that people want. All that matters is what adults want and what they set out to achieve, and children can be expected to adapt to it, however it works out in practice."
Statistics given at the conference by Prof Patricia Casey bear out the fact that the family form in Ireland is changing, with a rise both in marital breakdown and cohabitation. However, it does not automatically follow that social policy should treat cohabitation as if it were an equivalent to marriage.
Perhaps we need to take a long, cool look at the move to frame marriage as simply public recognition of a loving relationship, and instead see whether there is a virtue in retaining marriage as an institution primarily designed to provide the best possible environment for children.
A marriage licence is not a guarantee of bliss. Marriages break down too. However, the breakdown rate is far higher among couples who live together.
It does not follow that every child of a relationship that has broken down is doomed to be dysfunctional.
A great deal depends on how the situation is handled, but we are unwilling to look at the fact that, no matter how well it is handled, it is a time of immense sadness and fear for children.
As Almond shows, research from many sources demonstrates that, by and large, children do better in stable, married families. If this is so, why are children's rights advocates not automatically advocates for marriage? Why do we put effort into helping people to achieve the "good divorce", or the "good end of a relationship" where children are put first, but we put little or no effort into preventing break-ups in the first place?
We accept that marital breakdown or the stresses and strains of lone parenthood are very difficult to cope with for adults. Yet our rhetoric in regard to children is all about how resilient and adaptable they are, and how well they bounce back. This is particularly common in the parent who is "moving on" from the relationship, and much less common from the one left behind. People assure themselves that it is better for the children if they are happy, and that it would be worse for them if their parents were miserable.
I remember a bleak sentence from Judith Wallerstein, a researcher who followed children of divorce for 25 years, to the effect that children don't really care if you are happy. They just want you to be there and be together.
We should not lightly change the definition of the family based on marriage in the Constitution. Advocates of unmarried fathers want to ditch this constitutional provision because the Supreme Court has said that it precludes unmarried fathers from full recognition.
Yet unmarried mothers have automatic rights, in spite of the Constitution. Of course, these rights arose from a number of factors. In the era before DNA testing, when the identity of the father might be in dispute, the role of the person giving birth was pretty indisputable.
Unmarried mothers' rights also stemmed from a patriarchal presumption that women were the only ones fit for the care of children. It cannot have been disconnected from the fact that most of the occupants of the bench were career-minded, middle-aged men from privileged backgrounds who would find the idea of a man being the main carer faintly astonishing.
We should be able to vindicate rights for fathers without messing with the most child-centred institution, marriage. Ironically, even today, happy marriages are most people's dream.
People do two things, that is, cohabit and get married much later in the hope of making that dream come true.
Neither is particularly effective and, in fact, cohabiting without commitment for any period of time decreases the chances of a successful marriage.
Other countries are streets ahead of us in terms of premarital education, marriage education and enrichment, and services that are designed to make it easier to stay together than to separate.
Unfortunately, here we take refuge in the rhetoric of family diversity because it is easier. Easier, that is, on everyone but the children. Perhaps that is where we need the wake-up call.