Fathers who want joint custody of their children and feel they are being discriminated against by the family law courts held a Father's Day march in Dublin at the weekend.
The group, which calls itself Non-Disposable Daddies Ireland (NODDI), marched to Leinster House to highlight what it described as the marginalisation and discrimination against it by the family law court system.
The chairman of NODDI, Mr Sean Kelly, said the courts deprived children of their fathers, resulting in long-term damage to the children. While fathers were deemed by the courts to have responsibilities to maintain their children financially, their importance as providers of a loving relationship to their children was not considered.
"The normal cultural prescription in Irish family law courts is that the woman gets the home and the children, the father gets the bills and the bedsit. The effect of this is that children are deprived of their fathers, because it is not practical to carry on family life in a one-room bedsit," Mr Kelly said. He said NODDI wanted to let the many thousands of Irish men living with injustice in isolation know that they were not alone.
NODDI was set up to promote joint custody of children and responsible shared parenting as the non-negotiable starting point in a family breakdown situation.
In a statement, the group said its aim was to remove conflict from the family equation by moving away from a traditionally adversarial court, where no records were kept and injustices went unreported, to a humane and family-friendly mediation centred approach where people could learn both to co-operate and move on without the bitterness that the "winner takes all" scenario generated.
The group urged the wearing of black arm-bands all this week, not only to mourn the demise of the role of the father in Irish society, but to "commemorate" the dozens of young men who could no longer endure the pain of their children being removed from them and ended their own lives, the statement said.