If our assumption in disposing of family breakdown was that fathers were incapable of loving their children, we would scarcely make our arrangements any differently. In the vast majority of cases, the breakdown in parental relations results in the family unit being redefined as mother and children, the father sent away to make his own arrangements, begin a new life, become a new person, find a new meaning. This is what confronts men who find themselves at the end of the life with the loves of their life, whether they like it or not.
We should hardly be surprised when awful things happen. But we are because, consciously or not, we do believe that men are incapable of loving their children, or at least not in a way as to cause these men unbearable pain when they lose the possibility of sustaining that love, or at the very least not to the same extent and with the same intensity as mothers love their children. We do not state this, but the system we have created says it with each of its actions, decisions, recommendations and judgments.
Our family courts, without authority from God or Constitution, sit in judgment on the very essences of people's lives, dispensing "custody" and "access" on the word of people you would not allow into your house to clean your chimneys. Yet, in the Constitution it is set forth that: "The State . . . guarantees to respect the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide . . . for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children." "Inalienable" means "not able to be transferred to another".
Thus, the rights of parents, without distinction as to gender, cannot legally or morally be interfered with, except if they have failed in their parental duty.
When awful things happen we are left with a stark choice: either we entertain the possibility that what we believe, and what we do on foot of our beliefs, is wrong, is causing this awfulness; or we jump to the conclusion that what has happened is a vindication of our beliefs. Needless to say, we take the option best adapted to protecting our beliefs: e.g., a vengeful, rageful, hateful man has lost control and done something beyond human comprehension.
Sometimes events threaten this tendency. A mother stops her car close to a pier, checks her two daughters are strapped into the back seat, and drives into the water. The episode merits a subdued silence.
Another mother snatches her son during a supervised visit, brings him to a beach and holds his head under the water until he is dead. She is admitted to a psychiatric hospital and there is some talk of depression. The silence resumes.
Since time began, mothers have been more likely than fathers to kill their children, but this fact, like many others, is inconvenient to our collective beliefs.
The unspeakable deaths of Deirdre and Christopher Crowley raise many questions about this society and its capacity for human decency. In truth, this case is unique only in its horrific culmination.
Every other week, children are snatched by one of their parents, more frequently by mothers. Most of those who have their children taken away from them in this way have the greatest difficulty in persuading the authorities to help them.
Frequently, the abducting parent is protected and vindicated by alleged public servants motivated by ideological agendas. Invariably, such parents are women.
At the launch last year of the Irish Centre for Parentally Abducted Children, I asked the assembled panel of Irish women who had associated themselves with this issue about the guiding principles relating to parental abduction. I was assured that the watchword must be compassion, not just for children and the parent left behind, but also for the abducting parent. One of those present was Mary Banotti, who last week, stressing she was "gender neutral", said she knew of no situation where there were fears for the life of a child abducted by his or her mother, but of several in which there had been cause for concern when fathers had abducted their children. Perhaps she confines her reading of the newspapers to articles with headlines about "killer dads".
Compassion? Dead or alive, in the absence of his version of events, Christopher Crowley was spoken of as though he were self-evidently a criminal. A few weeks ago, one Garda officer said of him: "If a four-year-old girl was taken by a stranger, the whole country would be up in arms. But because it was her father, people don't seem to be as concerned. They say that the case is sad, but tend to think that she is safe with her father." This man, if he has children, must know in his heart that the essence of what he said was wrong, that children are nowhere as safe as in the company of their natural fathers.
But, in suggesting that a child's father, once he has been removed from his family, is a stranger and a danger to his child or children, a potential outlaw with no rights except as dictated by the society, he did unwittingly summarise our collective public beliefs.
Believing this, can we be surprised when our beliefs are so comprehensively, appallingly affirmed?
jwaters@irish-times.ie