Sir, - In his column entitled "Women who banish fathers seen as heroines" (Opinion, October 6th), John Waters states: "Women are lone parents in 84 per cent of cases not because men abandon their children but because we refuse to treat men and women as equal human beings."
While agreeing completely that men and women have equal rights and responsibilities in parenting as in every sphere of life, and that our current laws are unfair to single fathers, I fail to see what Mr Waters hopes to achieve by distorting the facts.
Firstly, I can assure him that some men do abandon their children, not because they are being denied their rights, but because, regardless of how it affects the child, they do not want the burden of responsibility.
Secondly, some women have very valid reasons for denying fathers access to their children. Why is Mr Waters choosing to forget or ignore the many cases of women and children fleeing violent and abusive ex-partners?
I suggest that is it not merely a misandrist notion but a fact of many lives that many fathers, married and single, have, down through the years, chosen not to make their children their top priority and that this in part has led to the current situation in which the mother is seen as the chief parent.
For Mr Waters to imply that a lack of parental involvement by single fathers is somehow mostly the fault of single mothers who exclude them or treat them unfairly, and who are working in collusion with misandristic lawmakers, smacks a little of looking for "a woman to blame". - Yours, etc., Una Marnell,
Balcurris Road, Ballymun, Dublin 11.