The killing of Deirdre Crowley released a surge of anger and bewilderment. Within days, her dead father Christopher was at risk of becoming a martyr or a demon, depending where you stood. He loved her, some said. He couldn't have, said others. This week, the two were buried separately in Cork.
Ireland has seen worse crimes against children, yet few so shocking. Chris Crowley's apparent sanity and the awful time-scale over which the story unfolded tap into primeval fears. Like Medea, Crowley killed his child rather than face a future he could not control. But unlike her, his tragic actions were not inevitable.
We can only speculate about whether Crowley's love was in fact obsession, the desire of an over-protective parent to minimise or deprive their child of influences other than his. Sure knowledge of his intentions died with him, whatever the outcomes of the Garda investigation and whether the Minister for Health decides to review procedures for identifying children at risk, which obviously failed in this case.
But the agenda of fighting and winning that characterises some of the discourse around the issue needs scrutiny. Apocalyptic language about the care and custody of children raises already heated passions to fever pitch. Some people assume the Crowley case resulted from the current impasse in Irish family law. This is a large assumption. Certainly, the courts system is stuck in a rut designed for different times and mores, and the Law Reform Commission's recommendations for change remain ignored.
The most dangerous place for a child is its own family. Across cultures and time, the child is under greatest threat from her father, her male relatives and her mother, in that order. Blood and kinship ties make it more, not less, likely a child will suffer emotional or physical injury from adults who say they love her, especially when they are locked in combat.
Two days after the killings, Positive Parenting, an action group and helpline for parents in custody disputes, released a statement linking the Crowley killings to the despair of fathers who contact them. "Recently, one caller asked for advice about how to abduct a child to New Zealand or anywhere where the parent and child could not be found," it said.
"When asked why he wanted to take this drastic step, he replied that he wanted his wife to feel what he was feeling, the pain of the injustice which was all-consuming. The pain of knowing that his child was being poisoned against him. `I am sick of being treated like a monster simply because I am a man,' he said. He told [the helpline] how the sceptic circle of his wife's `friends and advisers' always referred to their husbands as `the bastard'. I put it to him that she would never know what it was like to be a bastard because of her absolute belief that the boy in question was her sole property that he had no entitlement to. This belief, borne out of feminist ideology and copper-fastened by the legal profession, psychiatrists and social workers, not to mention members of the judiciary, made her the omnipotent victim," the statement said.
"If he was a `bastard', because she was bored with him or because he did not live up to her expectations of him, imagine the kind of `bastard' he would be if he abducted the child. No court in Ireland was ever going to give him sole custody of his child, so she was never going to find out what it was like to be a second-class parent, a second-class citizen and a disposable mother. I told him he could take his son to the dark side of the moon but he would always be a `bastard' and a `monster' while his controlling wife would always be a `victim'. He would be pilloried and have his character and reputation destroyed, yet she would be rewarded for her implacable hostility and would be supported by everyone," the group said.
Having your prejudices confirmed when your world is collapsing all around you may give short-term relief. Longer term, it digs you into a destructive mindset where scoring points becomes its own end. A relationship breakdown makes it hard to think straight. At precisely the time you have never felt such lack of love for your former partner, you have to co-operate on arrangements for your children's care. In a sense, parents who can't resolve their relationship and custody arrangements through dialogue and mediation have already failed their children before they ever see a court.
It is more comforting to imagine murder and suicide as indicating a disturbed or insane mind than to watch a seemingly perfect father-daughter bond being played out in cold blood. Once you enter the cycle of winning and losing, the fear of failure dominates everything you do. If a man is encouraged to believe himself to be pitched against the system, his deepest fears are unharnessed. He becomes trapped in a fantasy of heroic endeavour, and its downside, paranoia, from which he will find it hard to escape. When that happens, calamity is a step away.
mruane@irish-times.ie