Does anyone seriously suggest that the behaviour of people in the Big Brother house is typical of the way people behave all the time? Is it proposed that television cameras and a considerable viewing audience have no influence on what people do or say, asks John Waters.
Do speed cameras have no impact on the speed at which people drive? Does the presence of a teacher and/or a school inspector have no effect on the decibel levels in a classroom?
Judging by the ingenuous media response to Carol Coulter's first report on the family law system, teachers, speed cameras and Big Brother's implacable gaze are to be regarded as entirely neutral phenomena, having no influence on conditions in their purview. From the beginning, this exercise has been presented as capable of exposing the true nature of the family law system. This claim is risible. The family law system is incompetent, corrupt and brutal, but it is surely within the capacities of even incompetent, corrupt brutes to raise their game a little when Big Sister is watching.
Her report, compiled on the basis of observations of one court, the Dublin Circuit Family Court, for the month of October 2006, has been greeted with a complete absence of media rigour. In an extraordinary editorial last Tuesday, this newspaper claimed that Big Sister's report "dispels a number of myths about family law", including "the complaints of organisations representing fathers that the courts favour mothers on access to children or custody", which, the editorial noted, "appear to be debunked by the level of pre-court agreements".
Really? According to Big Sister, 90 per cent of cases are settled without going to court. Employing a quasi-legal term, she describes these agreements as occurring "by consent". But "consent" here means only that no judge was called on to intervene, the word bearing but the most tenuous connection to its ordinary usage, Almost invariably, a man goes into family law proceedings with several guns to his head and his "consent" has no meaning except a legal one.
Since most of the cases she surveyed were divorce cases, and it is not possible to obtain a divorce in this jurisdiction other than by "consent", the figures Ms Coulter presents are misleading. It is striking that nowhere in her report does she provide a gender breakdown of applicants and respondents. What does she know of the basis on which these agreements were reached? Nothing. For the 90 per cent of cases settled outside courtrooms to be accepted as indicative of a genuine phenomenon of consent, the vital statistics for these cases would need to emerge as broadly similar to the vital statistics of contested cases. They do not.
Take custody: Carol Coulter claims that custody is awarded jointly in the vast majority of contested cases, and that this is reflected also in out-of-court settlements. But she then notes that this "joint custody" involves the child or children living with the mother. This makes no sense, for what on earth is "custody" if not the daily care of and responsibility for children? Indeed the concept of "care and residence", mentioned in this newspaper's report last week, has no meaning at all in Irish law. What we have here is a sleight of language designed to conceal the underlying reality, which remains as I and others have been describing it for years.
If we look more closely at the figures, it emerges that there is actually a wide divergence between those for contested and uncontested custody cases.
In the month surveyed by Carol Coulter, 11 per cent of negotiated settlements resulted in sole custody to the mother, compared with nearly 30 per cent of contested cases. In other words, even on the basis of a mangled terminology and statistics, and even in a system on its best behaviour while Big Sister was watching, a father was nearly three times more likely to lose his children by going to court than by negotiating directly with the mother.
It is clear, therefore, that those 90 per cent of fathers who sought out-of-court settlements were behaving rationally in the face of manifest and anticipated injustice.
(In fact, legally speaking, none of these fathers could have lost custody by negotiation, because it is legally impossible for a father to voluntarily cede custody of his children.)
Most interesting about the launch of this report has been its use by media to validate an ideologically-centred failure to report on the reality of family courts.
Had it not been for this column in the past decade, almost nothing of this reality would have been conveyed to readers of The Irish Times. To suggest now that Big Sister has debunked what I and a few others have been pointing out for years is ludicrous and self-serving.
This report serves only to camouflage the true nature of family law. I would describe it and its coverage as a joke were we not dealing with the most serious and systematic abuse of human rights, as well as the most abject failure of journalistic inquiry, on the part of the media in general, in the history of the State.