Constitution or no, it is respectable to insinuate that men who fail to pay maintenance should be jailed, writes JOHN WATERS.
UNTIL LAST Monday, was it conceivable that, in the depths of the worst recession for 80 years, someone might seek to reverse the general sense of understanding towards anyone currently unable to repay a debt? Could we have dreamed, after the year we’ve been through, of an individual making the front page of a national newspaper by implicitly bemoaning the idea that one category of citizen might avail of the protections of the Constitution or the current societal embrace of compassion towards those in financial difficulty?
Imagine, for example, a banker insisting that widows or single mothers must continue to be jailed for debt-default? Is it possible that such an intervention would encounter anything but the most vehement moral condemnation? Yet, last Monday, the family lawyer Geoffrey Shannon was allocated space on the front page of this newspaper for his thinly veiled assertion – unaccompanied by editorial outrage – that, recession or no recession, ex-husbands and fathers who default on maintenance payments should continue to face imprisonment, despite a court having decided that imprisonment for indebtedness is unconstitutional.
“Ruling may undermine orders to pay maintenance” was the headline on this landmark report, implying that certain groups should remain beyond human sympathy. Shannon, we were told, had said that enforcement of family maintenance orders might become “more difficult” in the wake of the recent High Court ruling on financial debt, in which Justice Mary Laffoy ruled that imprisonment for inability to repay a debt is unconstitutional. Being a “liberal” lawyer, Shannon did not expressly say that men (it is men all but invariably who are ordered to pay maintenance) should be jailed if they defaulted on maintenance payments. He said, apparently, enforcement of maintenance orders has always been “fraught with difficulty”; that the ultimate penalty facing someone who refuses to pay maintenance is imprisonment, but that the recent judgment appeared to remove that deterrent and could have “a significant impact on the enforcement of . . . payments”.
I can extract no meaning from this other than that Geoffrey Shannon was indicating dismay at this development. The Laffoy ruling has similar implications for all kinds of debtors, and has on this account been widely welcomed in a society recognising that some citizens are in the throes of unprecedented difficulty.
The Irish Times report also observed that the recent ruling could present “difficulties” for the State in recouping some social welfare payments – such as one-parent family allowance and deserted wife’s allowance – from what are termed “liable relatives”. Under the Liability to Maintain a Family scheme, a man deemed to be “liable” for a woman choosing to draw one of these payments may be pursued to replenish State coffers. Recession, Constitution and democracy notwithstanding, it remains respectable to insinuate that men who cannot meet such payments be deprived of their freedom.
If there is any mystery remaining about how a category of citizen can become separated from the moral embrace of society, we need only to reflect on these facts. Geoffrey Shannon was tapping into a global prejudice, based mainly on assertion and propaganda by vested interests, that, given a chance, men will abrogate their responsibilities.
In many instances, maintenance orders are issued against men who have done nothing wrong. Having been divorced against their wishes, having lost the homes they built, and having had their children taken away from their sight for sometimes all but a few hours per month, such men are often burdened with debts arbitrarily calculated and frequently unrelated to ability to pay. In many instances, maintenance is morally indistinguishable from a ransom payment. And all this is decided in secret courts, which men must pay enormous additional lump-sums to be mugged and abused in.
Recently a man told me of being ordered to make a €250 weekly payment to his ex-wife, allegedly to “maintain” his two children. He pointed out that, in the course of his marriage, he had built a business for his wife, which he had surrendered and which she still ran successfully, and that he was now, in rented accommodation, the de facto primary carer for the children. He also explained that, as a musician, he did not earn enough to pay this “maintenance”. The judge told him to “get a job delivering pizza”, a standard one-liner of this particular beak, and by all accounts always guaranteed to raise a chortle on the lawyers’ benches. Although those making fortunes from this rottenness like to pretend their targets are feckless men, the ones who usually get jailed are unemployed fathers who have attempted, in spite of the State’s best efforts, to maintain relationships with their children.
This culture criminalises innocent men, turns children into cash crops, destroys the essence of love in our culture and enriches lawyers. And, yes, Geoffrey Shannon is right: these obscenities depend for their continuance on the threat of incarceration.