Depression alone cannot explain murder-suicide of Flood family in Clonroche

Depressed people rarely engage in physical violence towards others

Text of my article in The Evening Herald, Friday 2nd May 2008:

Depression and anxiety are the twin scourges of our emotional world but society views each of them very differently.

It's 'alright' to be stressed out - in some settings it may even be the done thing to complain about stress on the idiotic grounds that if you're not stressed you're not working hard enough.

But it's 'not alright' to be depressed and people with the condition often keep it to themselves for that reason. Some, for instance, will not state on an application form for life insurance that they have suffered depression because they fear they will be denied cover.

That said, it is unlikely that depression, or depression on its own, could account for acts such as the murder-suicide of the Flood family in Co Wexford.

It seems reasonable to suppose that some level of delusion, perhaps including hallucinations or voices, could have provided the impulse for the tragedy.

Depression involves a debilitating mixture of low mood, negative thoughts and fatigue. The sufferer loses interest in his or her usual activities.

Depression can arise as a reaction to life events. The birth of a child, for instance, can be followed by post-natal depression. Grief can turn into depression. So can a sense of helplessness or of being trapped in an unhappy relationship.

Researchers believe depression has increased over the past one hundred years. The reasons for this are not clear but depression may be the price we pay for our increasingly sedentary lifestyle. We no longer 'work off' negative moods or feelings and we have too much time to brood which, in itself, can trigger or prolong depression.

People suffering from depression generally begin to seek help by going to their GP. The GP will probably prescribe medication and may also refer them to a counsellor. Counselling can be very effective in helping people to overcome depression and to change the thinking patterns or circumstances that may have led them to become depressed in the first place.

Depressed people are the last you would expect to indulge in violence. Indeed, some psychologists believe that people become depressed because they turn their anger in on themselves instead of inflicting it on others.

This, again, is why we need to be cautious about attributing the terrible events in Clonroche to depression in the father. As a report in yesterday's Evening Herald pointed out, it is highly unusual for a depressed person to kill someone else.

But there is, as we all know, a strong link between depression and self-harm including suicide. Sometimes this happens when the depressed person starts to feel better because it is only now that they have the energy to carry out the act. This, obviously, is a point at which counselling can be crucial.

Many depressed people also turn to self help groups such as Aware, Grow and Recovery. These can provide a real lifeline for people with depression, especially for those who cannot afford private counselling fees.

The most important step to take in depression is to seek help whether from a counsellor, GP or self-help group.

This is not as easy a step to take as it may seem. A considerable amount of prejudice against persons with mental health problems persists, as research by the National Office for Suicide Prevention revealed last year. The researchers found that 52 per cent of people interviewed did not believe people with mental health problems should be working in jobs such as medicine. One third would be uncomfortable talking to a person with mental health problems - completely ignoring the fact that they have probably talked to people with mental health problems quite often without knowing it. Thirty nine per cent thought the public ‘should be better protected’ from people with mental health problems.

We all get a touch of the blues from time to time. Very often depression lifts by itself but when it persists people should seek help - we need to make it easy for them to do so.

Aware has a helpline at 1890 303 302 and has self-help groups throughout the country. The Samaritans are at 1850 60 90 90. Grow is at 1890 474 474. Recovery can be contacted at 01 6260775.

Tragedy of Flood family murder-suicide in Co Wexford

No satisfactory explanations for murder-suicide

(This is the text of my article in The Evening Herald on 28th April)

The apparent murder-suicide of the Flood family at Clonroche has one thing in common with most other suicides.

This is that we have no satisfactory explanation as to why it happened and we are unlikely to get one.

When an individual commits suicide, the person's family may spend years seeking an explanation. But even suicide notes usually fail to give a satisfactory reason for such a drastic step.

In the case of murder-suicide, the mystery is even greater. Why would a man who, for some reason, has decided to take his life, bring his family with him? Why - if this is how it happened - did he do it in such a way that his children were left to die in a fire after their parents were dead? (Note: since this article appeared, there is reason to believe that the children were drugged before the fire began).

Gardaí have been unable to find anything at all in the background of the family to explain what happened.

A Garda source is quoted this morning as saying that there must be people who can throw light on the event. It may well be that today or this week we will find out more.

And yet a description of the events that lead up to a murder-suicide does not necessarily constitute a satisfactory explanation for it.

Studies of murder-suicides by researchers suggest, unsurprisingly, that stressful life events are often involved. These can include financial losses and marital discord.

But a great many people suffer financial losses and marital discord without killing themselves or anyone else - and we don't know whether such factors were present in the Flood family.

Depression is also a frequently found factor in murder-suicide, especially where a person kills his or her own children as well. There have been tragedies over the years in which a parent a depressed parent has taken this course of action.

But depression is one of the most common emotional problems and is something which almost all of us have experienced or will experience to an extent at least. Again, it rarely leads to tragedies of this kind.

Something additional is needed and it is thought that psychosis is often the ingredient that can turn a 'normal' depression into a murder-suicide.

Psychosis is a state of mind in which a person loses touch with reality. A person may hallucinate or hear voices telling them to act in a certain way.

Research suggests that more people hear imaginary voices than we think but that they know the voices have no independent reality and ignore them.

In psychosis, however, the person may believe the voices to be real and may obey whatever it is that they are telling him or her to do.

Paranoia, or an extreme and unrealistic level of jealousy, can also be behind murder-suicides insofar as experts have been able to deduce their causes.

Were any of these factors present in the Flood family? We may or may not find out.

Because of the devastation caused by these tragedies and because of their horrific nature, it is important that an attempt is made to establish causes.

This can best be done by a psychological post-mortem as it is called. A psychological post-mortem is carried out by interviewing everybody who might have information about the state of mind of the perpetrator in the period leading up to the event. It is quite separate to a Garda investigation or a physical post-mortem.

It is also of the greatest importance that people touched by this tragedy get psychological help, if they need it, in the future.

The death of the Flood family has left friends and relatives in shock. But when the shock wears off there will be people among them who will never be the same again.

These people need emotional support and may need it for years to come.

That is what is important now.

Nuala O'Faolain opens the way for other terminally ill people to say how they feel

This is the text of my article which appeared in The Evening Herald on Monday, 15th April 2008. Please note that many listeners found listening to the interview distressing. A transcript is here on the Irish Independent website. O'Faolain is author of Are you somebody, Almost there, My dream of you and The story of Chicago May.

[Note: Nuala O'Faolain died on 9th May 2008]Many people have wondered if Nuala O’Faolain’s interview with Marian Finucane on RTÉ Radio One on Saturday was distressing to persons with terminal illness. I would suggest that the interview was distressing to all of us but potentially comforting as well, two reasons.

The first is that we all have a terminal illness because, like her, we will all suffer death though not all of us will know about it at the time. The second is that people with terminal illnesses are expected by society to face the end in a particular way, namely with serenity, yet for many this is not the way they want to do it.

The bleakness and despair in her interview struck home particularly, I think, because it echoed that awful bleakness that a person can feel when they are awake alone in the middle of the night and the gloomiest of thoughts come to haunt them.

Nuala brought that bleakness into the light of a Saturday morning when most of us do not want to be reminded of it.

Psychologists say that one of the great crises we face in our lives is the realisation that we are going to die. We all know intellectually that one day we will die but it can take decades for us to feel the full force of that realisation. It can be triggered by the death of another person, even somebody we do not know very well.

When the realisation happens, we must come to terms with a reality that shakes us to foundations. Some people respond to the reality by denying it. They aim for eternal life on earth and take any treatment that promises to prevent the inevitable. Others become depressed or anxious or turn to drink or drugs. Most of us, I think, take the realisation of the inevitability of death as a wake-up call suggesting that we had better get on with doing the things we wanted to do in life.

In her interview, Nuala sound like somebody whom that realisation only hit six weeks ago when she got her diagnosis of terminal cancer. She is trying to cope with the realisation and the reality at the same time, an enormous demand on any human being. In saying that, I realise that I am presuming a great deal and that I may be entirely wrong.

One of the ways we deny the reality of death is to expect other people to die with a smile on their lips. Nearly twenty years ago, Therese Brady, who was then director of post-graduate training in clinical psychology at University College Dublin, complained about the expectation that people should face the death in ways that everybody else approved of. She developed the bereavement counselling service for the Irish Hospice Foundation. People who were dying were expected to do so in line with the expectations of a society which had, she said, “outlawed distress.”

It seems to me that by outlawing distress we have denied dying people the right to talk about this most significant of events. How often is the person who is dying told, when they want to express their feelings about it, “Don’t be talking like that, shure you’ll outlive us all”? What does it feel like, I wonder, to have to put up with that sort of nonsense when you are trying to make sense of your own death?

We will all face death in our own different ways. What Nuala’s interview has done, I hope, is to give permission to those who wish, in the words of Dylan Thomas, to “rage, rage against the dying of the light” to go right ahead and do so regardless of how the rest of us feel about it.

I wish Nuala some comfort in her journey.

Irish rape survey - distinguishing between recklessness and the guilt of the rapist?

This is the text of my article in The Evening Herald on 26th March 2008:

It is too easy to dismiss as outrageous the views of those who believe that, in some circumstances, women carry part of the responsibility if they are raped and to leave it at that.

But the views expressed in the latest opinion poll are not those of a small, deviant minority. For example, the poll found that 37 per cent of those questioned thought a woman who flirted extensively was complicit to some extent if she was the victim of a sex crime.

Thirty seven per cent is a massive proportion when it comes to opinions in a society, so we need to look at what is going on here and at what these results might mean, unpalatable as they are.

I expect that almost all of those who see women in certain circumstances as having contributed to their situation, would also favour the current life sentence for their rapists.

I think that what people are doing here is drawing a distinction between the responsibility of all of us to ourselves for our own survival and the responsibility carried by criminals for their crimes.

There is also behind these figures, I think, a belief that in a society in which rapists usually get away with it, people need to look to and take responsibility for their own safety. This belief has nothing to do with reducing the degree of guilt belonging to the rapist. It is a question of survival in a dangerous world.

To me the most revealing finding in the Irish Examiner/Red C poll is that 38 per cent of respondents believe that if a woman walks through a deserted area and is raped, she carries some of the blame for what happened.

Does this mean, that 38 per cent of people believe the rapist is somehow “less guilty” in this situation? I don’t, for a second, believe it does.

I think those 38 per cent would regard the rapist in this situation as a predatory thug who carries one hundred per cent responsibility for his actions and who deserves a life sentence.

So what are they saying about the woman? I think what they are saying is that the woman who walks through a deserted area needs to take responsibility, not for the rape but for having comprised her own personal safety in a foolish way.

So there are two separate issues going on here. One is the issue of the rape which is completely the responsibility of the rapist. The second is the issue of responsibility towards one’s own personal safety.

It is a feature of this and all surveys that it’s hard to know just what is in people’s mind when they answer questions. Take the finding that more than 30 per cent of people would say that a woman is responsible in some way for a rape if she has flirted with a man or has failed to say ‘No’ clearly.

It seems to me that there is a major difference between flirting and failing to say ‘No’ clearly. If you are in bed with someone and you fail to say ‘No’ clearly, I am not sure how you would sustain a charge of rape, morally or in the courts.

But flirting? How can 30 per cent see flirting as making a woman somehow complicit in rape? Does it depend on what they mean by flirting? Even extreme flirting, in my view, does not excuse rape but we don’t know what was in the minds of those respondents and I assume – I hope – they do not mean ‘normal’ flirting.

The issues raised in the survey are complicated and emotional. They need to be debated. Let’s not walk away from these findings, uncomfortable as they are. Let’s talk about them.

Got an opinion? Comment here.

High time to end the trek for the morning-after pill

This is the text of my article in The Evening Herald on Saturday, 1st March 2008:

Every Sunday, women make long journeys to Dublin to attend clinics run by the Irish Family Planning Association. Their purpose is to get the morning-after pill.

Emergency contraception is available in this country only on prescription, though you can get it over the counter in the UK. So in Ireland, the woman who has unprotected sex or who fears that her long-term contraception may not have protected her, must find a GP, and fast.

But there are many rural areas in which it is very difficult to find a GP on a Sunday morning – and many a woman would be embarrassed to go to her family doctor looking for the morning-after pill.

For the morning-after pill to be at its most effective it should be taken with 24 hours of unprotected sex. If that is done, there is a 95 per cent likelihood that it will prevent a pregnancy which would otherwise have occurred.

Within 24 and 48 hours, the pill is 85 per cent effective. And it is 60 per cent effective if taken within 48 and 72 hours.

So time is crucial when it comes to the use of the morning-after pill.

In the UK and elsewhere the woman can go down to her local chemist and buy the morning-after pill without prescription. In Ireland, we make them go through the embarrassment and expense of visiting a GP.

If you can’t find a GP on first thing on a Sunday, then too bad. You should have thought of that before you got yourself into this fix. You have had your fun and now you must pay for it.

This is not a view any reasonable parent would want to inflict on, say, their teenage daughter.

When the Irish Pharmaceutical Union commissioned a survey of 1,000 people on this issue, 75 per cent favoured making the morning-after pill available without prescription. Nowadays we accept that people have sex and that we should not punish them for by forcing them to make penitential journeys to family planning clinics.

The Irish Medicines Board is the key body when it comes to deciding whether the morning-after pill should be sold over the counter or not.

It takes the view that requiring a prescription for emergency contraception is “appropriate” because it means the GP can “monitor” the reactions of patients using it. What a load of old tosh. Either emergency contraception is so potentially dangerous that it should only be given out on a doctor’s prescription, or it is not.

The fact is that the UK, with a regulatory system just as good as ours has found nothing to suggest that the morning-after pill should be a prescription-only drug.

It seems to me that somebody in power should lean on the Irish Medicines Board to help them to take a difference view. Why should women have to go on paying the price of this policy?

Is the morning-after pill an abortifacient, as some have suggested? It isn’t, and if it was, it wouldn’t be available here even on prescription. So far as in known, the pill works by preventing ovulation or delaying it or by preventing a fertilised egg from settling in the womb. It doesn’t appear to cause an embryo already implanted in the womb to abort.

We live in an era in which you can buy condoms in your local Spar. Why should this other form of contraception involve, for some women, a penitential journey of 100 miles or more to a family planning clinic at the weekends?

We really do need to end this nonsense and we need those in authority to take note of the fact that most people want to end it.

As vicious acts of violence grow we need a two-track approach to dealing with the problem

This is the text of my article in The Evening Herald on 26th February 2008:

The other day, as newspapers were writing headlines about the apparent involvement of teenagers in an incident that has led to the death of at least one man, a caller to Joe Duffy’s Liveline programme described a bullying incident carried out against his son at school.

The incident was so vicious and so without mercy that Duffy described it as evil. On other programmes recently we have heard of families from hell who pursue vendettas simply because a neighbour has asked the parents to stop their children behaving in an anti-social manner.

And it is not uncommon to hear of random acts of violence, sometimes fatal, carried out against people who are doing nothing more than walking home alone at night.

That is the context in which the involvement of teenagers in a fatal incident in Dublin needs to be seen.

Very often, the people perpetrating acts of violence and terror against others appear to have no internal set of values to prevent them engaging in such acts – or at least no set of values that the rest of us understand. Indeed, some perpetrators glory in the violence they mete out. Far from being ashamed of what they do, they continue to torment others in full view of their neighbours.

What is most frightening is that in all too many cases the violence perpetrated by an out of control young person is backed up by the entire family.

There are a good many streets of our cities in which people live in fear of just one violent, anti-social family. Those who stand up to them even in the mildest way pay the price of in verbal and physical abuse for years afterwards. Others are fearful of getting the same treatment and keep quiet. The Gardai seem unable to do anything much about it.

What seems to characterise some of these perpetrators is an absolute sense of their own entitlement. They and, indeed, their parents are entitled to do whatever they wish without any regard, good or bad, for the effect on neighbours. Neighbours who complain about this are, by definition, attacking them and must be punished.

It’s a perversion of how society is supposed to work.

What can be done about this? It seems to me that it the issue needs to be tackled from two angles. One is the law and order angle. The other is working with young children so they will not become perpetrators in their turn.

From the law and order point of view we need to find a way to give Gardai either the powers or the resources to deal with this “low level” thuggery and intimidation. One of the reasons for the success of the zero tolerance policy introduced by Rudi Giulani in New York in the 1990s was that these low level crimes were taken seriously. Another is that New York invests in policing. To the Irish visitor to New York the sheer visibility of police on foot patrol is truly striking compared to the comparative scarcity of Gardai on the beat at home.

Law and order is never the full answer to anything. We also need to be able to work with children from certain families to turn them away from this kind of behaviour and we need to start before they begin primary school.

Programmes working with pre-school children and their families have a proven track record of success in the United States. In Ireland we have only a handful of such projects compared to what is needed.

It’s not enough to lament the dreadful things that happen in our streets and neighbourhoods. We need to take these things seriously and to do something about them. Otherwise the innocent will go on paying the price.

Too easy to blame the internet for suicides in Wales

Photo by Guillermo Esteves (Flickr)

This is the text of my article in The Evening Herald on 20th February 2008:

The spate of teenage deaths by suicide in Wales has spurred speculation that the internet – especially tributes on social networking websites – has played a role in what has been going on.

The speculation has been rejected by the police. “They were all young people with big issues,” a police spokesman said. “There are a constellation of factors influencing these young people.”

So where has speculation about internet suicide pacts come from? Partly it comes from the belief that suicide pacts do exist and that the internet plays a role in these in some parts of the world.

Deaths arising from suicide pacts are a major source of concern in Japan where this phenomenon has been most reported. There, even complete strangers have taken their own lives as part of pacts made over the internet.

Closer to home, last summer saw the death of two young irish men who made a suicide pact over the internet.

Research in Britain suggests that about 12 couples a year take their lives in what might be called a suicide pact but this is not confined to teenagers and can be a response to depression or incurable illness.

But such pacts have existed since before the internet came along. So have copycat suicides. When singer Kurt Cobain took his own life in 1994, some fans also committed suicide. In 1994, hardly anybody used the internet, most people didn’t know what it was and social networking sites such as Bebo and My Space had not even been imagined.

There have been claims that tributes on the networking sites to those who killed themselves have led others to do the same. The theory sounds plausible until you consider that such tributes are only a part, indeed a small part, of the mourning that surrounds a death.

If you attend the funeral of somebody who has committed suicide, you will hear the same tributes that are heard at funerals for other people. There may be an underlying, unspoken sense of anger at the person who has destroyed the life of his or her family by committing this stupid act but a desperate attempt is made to act as though this is a normal funeral.

Such funerals are, needless to say, very emotional especially if a young person has died. I would suggest that they are far more emotional than a website tribute can be – yet I am unaware of any evidence that they lead to copycat deaths.

Similarly are we to say that the loving death notices placed in newspapers lead other people to think of suicide, even when we know that this is how the person died?

To work out whether the suicides in Wales are linked, we need to know whether these represent a rise in such deaths compared to previous periods or whether we are seeing a statistical cluster of largely unrelated deaths.

Suicides among young men in England and Wales are at their lowest level for three decades and among young women they are at their lowest level since 1968. This makes the deaths in Wales stand out even more.

The internet is open in the sense that suicide pacts made online are fairly easy for the police to uncover forensically . It is likely that such pacts, if behind the deaths in Wales, would have been discovered by now.

Following a death by suicide the question that haunts family and friends for years afterwards is, Why did he or she do it? Could we have prevented it? Usually there will never be a satisfactory answer to the question and families have to accept this fact before they can move on.

In the long run I suspect that there will never be a satisfactory explanation for these pointless deaths in Wales either.

The grim reality behind that rural retreat

Photo by Jasmic (Flickr)

This is the text of my article in The Evening Herald on 15th February 2008:

The rural retreat, complete with green fields, clear streams and singing birds seems idyllic when you’re stuck in urban traffic in the rain – but behind the pretty picture is a grimmer reality, judging by the latest comments from Dr Moosajee Bhamjee.

The Clare psychiatrist and former Labour Party TD has pointed to the demise of the rural pub and of other social facilities as a factor in suicide in country areas. The close-knit rural community of legend has, for too many people, become a thing of the past.

The link between the demise of the rural pub, depression and suicide is not necessarily to do with alcohol - it is to do with social contact. For men living alone, in particular, the pub provided a nightly or almost nightly immersion the affairs of the parish. It kept them connected. Drinking at home on your own is no substitute.

The concept of loneliness is one we are used to in the cities and towns. A city flat can be a very lonely place. So can a home in an urban housing estate where everybody else is at work all day. But at least in cities and towns you can go for a walk to the shops or to the post office and you can hope to meet somebody with whom you are at least on a nodding acquaintance. And if all else fails you can find a pub to go to at night.

There are still parts of rural Ireland in which there is a closeness between people that you will not find in cities and towns. Everybody living along a stretch of road knows each other; they have known each other for years and they look out for each other.

But if you live on the wrong road, if your nearest neighbours have gone, if you are unable to travel due to disability or if your local pub has shut down you can be utterly isolated in the countryside.

In any event, there is something wrong with the rural dream of the past. City people think of Clare as the quintessential rural county. In many respects I think it fair to say we were encouraged to think of the county of the De Valeras as more "real" than the cities. It was the home of traditional Irish music, of unforgettable sessions in the pubs, of poety, of wonderful natural scenery and of wonderful people.

Perhaps that was true and perhaps it is still true. Yet 17 people are thought to have taken their lives in Clare last year and two thirds of these lived in rural areas. Suicides in Clare outnumbered deaths from road accidents last year.

Six of these deaths were among men in their twenties and three were men in their thirties, forties and fifties. This suggests that suicide in Clare is not predominantly affecting elderly people. It is more likely that isolated, elderly people are prey to depression than to suicide.

More importantly, all of this suggests that the answer to rural depression involves social rather than medical measures. For example, there are roads in rural Ireland which a bus has never ever, ever passed down. If each rural area had an easily-accessible bus service even a couple of times a day the difference to the physical and mental health of rural dwellers would be enormous.

It seems highly unlikely that services like this can be run on a commercial basis. They would have to be subsidised out of taxes and, as far as I am concerned, it would be money well spent.

Meanwhile,though, I am for city and town living. The field and the stream may be attractive -but the lonely country road with the bus once a week definitely is not.

Cardinal Connell takes sex abuse tribunal to court - an unwelcome blast from the past

This is the text of my article in the Evening Herald on Friday 1st February on Cardinal Connell's (pictured above) surprise High Court intervention in the work of the tribunal investigating sex abuse by clergy in the Dublin archdiocese. Since then, on Monday 4th, the High Court adjourned the case for a week. Hopefully the Inquisition is working on Cardinal Connell in the meantime.

Update: On Monday 11th February, Connell withdrew his High Court action. I guess the Inquisition did its work alright.

“Saddened but not surprised” has so far been the reaction of victims of clerical sex abuse in Dublin to the court challenge by Cardinal Desmond Connell to the examination of files over which he claims privilege.

The files, reported as numbering 5,000, could help Judge Yvonne Murphy and her Archdiocese Commission of Investigation to arrive at the full truth of clerical child abuse in Dublin. Perhaps more importantly, they will reveal just what the Church did and did not do about the abuse when it learned what was going on.

The Archdiocese of Dublin has a great deal to fear from the inquiry headed by Judge Murphy. Those who have had dealings with her are aware that she has an incisive mind, capable of homing in on the relevant details in a mass of documents – even in 5,000 documents. The former journalist expresses herself with a sort of clarity that is foreign to the Church and especially to the Church of Cardinal Connell.

We know the general nature of the details that will hurt the Church when her report is eventually published. They will concern priests moved from parish to parish and therefore put in positions of moral authority despite their misbehaviour. They will also concern the legalistic response to abuse victims and their families which left them frustrated, angry and hurt.

As a journalist who attempted to cover such issues in the 1990s, I still recall the pain of people who believed the Archdiocese had little or no interest in them except to make their allegations go away. Their experience of dealing with the Church deepened the hurt already done.

I expect those in charge of the affairs of the Archdiocese at the time believed they were acting in the best interests of the Church and that their handling of these cases was entirely in accordance with the law.

But anyone who saw the pain of victims and their families at facing what they perceived to be a closed door when it came to having their complaints dealt with could only have welcomed a searching inquiry into the actions of those churchmen.

Such an inquiry, as we all know, can only be effective if it has access to documents outlining the actions and opinions of these churchmen at the time.

The Church already faces some very dark days indeed when Judge Murphy’s report is finally published. It is unlikely that the details of what went on will differ greatly from what we know already. It is the scale of abuse and the inadequacy of the Church’s response that will deepen the harm already done to its reputation.

To weather this storm in any fashion, the Church needs an archbishop like Diarmuid Martin who can demonstrate full cooperation with the inquiry and who represents a break with the past.

But now along comes Cardinal Connell who, by his legal challenge, will lead sceptics – and even those who are not sceptics – to believe that little has changed when it comes to the Church’s attitude to attempts to clear up this mess.

More importantly, his challenge reopens old wounds and old memories for victims of clerical abuse and their families. It is like a challenge from the past to the present. But Cardinal Connell is not in the past. Like the other men who ran the affairs of the Archdiocese when he was its head, he is very much in the present. Moreover, he is a man of authority in the Church, outranking Archbishop Martin.

When Judge Murphy’s report is published, this challenge will loom large in the minds of an outraged public. It will render more difficult the job of Archbishop Martin in convincing us all that the old Church has been replaced by a new one that deserves our trust.

Irish High Court expands unmarried fathers' rights

On 11th September, the High Court in Dublin ruled in favour of an umarried father, Mr G, who had argued that his right had been breached by the removal to England, without his consent, of his twin children (see Irish case may force ruling on unmarried fathers' rights). The ruling seems to foreshadow the expansion of the rights of unmarried and separated fathers - so long as legislators are prepared to translate the ruling into legislation. The following is the text of my article on the topic, published in The Evening Herald on 12th September:

The ruling in the Mr G case, in which the High Court found that the removal of his twin boys to England without his consent was a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights is a major boost for the rights of unmarried fathers and their children.

It also creates a situation in which fathers and mothers will look to the Oireachtas to clarify these rights and to lay them down as clearly as possible in law.

Unfortunately, the record of the Oireachtas in relation to difficult social issues makes it hard to believe that it will actually move on this issue. For many decades now, thorny decisions in this whole area have been left to the courts to the detriment of those who cannot afford to take the legal route.

Yet the involvement of lone fathers – I am using the word ‘lone’ here to refer to any fathers, married or unmarried, who are living apart from their children – has been shown time and again to benefit the children throughout their lives.

The grim days when the unmarried mother was shunned and her child put up for adoption whether she liked it or not are, thankfully, over. This attitude was at its height in the Sixties – for some girls in those grainy, black and white clips of people dancing to showbands, the party ended with a year in a mother and baby home and the removal of the baby to the United States.

Since then, society has changed enormously. Today approximately one third of births are outside marriage.

It is normal for parliaments to lag behind changes in society – very often these changes are not visible until after they happen.

Yet in 1994, the European Court of Human Rights signalled that marriage was not the only basis for family rights. In 1996, which is reasonably quickly as these things go, the Constitution Review Group recommended that the rights of all fathers in relation to their children be acknowledged so long as there was a stable relationship.

The Constitution Review Group may as well have spent the day at the races for all the notice Government took of this recommendation. But the report should be taken out of whatever dust-laded shelf it occupies and looked at by lawmakers at the highest level.

The fact is that everybody has an interest in this case. I would suggest that the vast majority of lone mothers promote contact between their children and the fathers of these childen. However, there will always be the minority who will allow their own feelings about the father to get in the way of that contact. Similarly there will always be a minority of fathers who will fail to honour their children’s need to be involved with them.

This judgement means that the onus is on the Oireachtas to provide for the rights of that majority of lone fathers who want to be involved with their children. And research by Barnardos and others has shown that children will do better at school and in their adult relationships if there is such involvement.

At the same time, mothers have a right to be worried about the prospect of a biological father who couldn't care less about his children coming in later and throwing his weight around.

But both the High Court and the Constitution Review Group have suggested strongly that it is the unmarried father who is genuinely involved with his children who has rights that cannot be taken away.

We need the Oireachtas now to step up to the plate and clarify these rights. Fathers and mothers need clarity on this issue.

But most of all clarity, and contact from fathers who care about them, is needed by the really important parties in this debate - the children.....

Even absent dads boost learning, adjustment and caring in kids - if they're involved

I wrote this for the Evening Herald, published 15th June 2007: Would you like to see more children growing up to be industrious, better educated and less likely to get in trouble with the law?

A report out this week from Barnardos suggests that one way to do this is to encourage fathers to be more involved with their children.

If that sounds blindingly obvious, just take a moment to look at some of the benefits outlined by Barnardos when launching the report on its “Da” project:

- Children are more likely to do well in primary school when their father shows kindness, care and warmth towards them at an early stage.

- Children are more likely to learn when their father shows a keen interest in learning.

- Children are more likely to be productive, industrious and caring members of society if their father takes an active interest in them.

- Children are less likely to end up in the criminal justice system when they have had regular contact with their father before the age of 11.

Living as we do in the age of the expert when everything must be made complicated, it’s heartening to see that such impressive benefits can flow from ordinary human warmth and involvement.

But bringing about this level of involvement by fathers is not necessarily a simple matter.

According to Barnardos’ “Da” project leader, Finola Halligan, most fathers want to be more involved in their children’s lives but family break-down, work demands and other obstacles stand in their way.

And Barnardos’ Francis Chance added that “too often fathers are invisible when state, community and voluntary services work with families.”

Barnardos’ findings, based on a project in Ballyfermot, are supported by research elsewhere. Recent research in the UK, for instance, found that children whose separated fathers stay involved with them are less likely to get into trouble than those whose fathers are uninvolved.

The growth in marriage breakdown and therefore in the number of one parent families makes it all the more important that obstacles to a father's involvement with his children should be tackled.

Recent census figures show that fewer than one in five households in Dublin city are now made up of the traditional family of husband, wife and children. Indeed, the number of traditional households actually declined in the main cities between 2002 2006.

One person households, on the other hand, continue to increase and more than 17% of these were made up of a separated, divorced person or married person living alone.

We must also take into account the number of cases in which the parents of a child have never lived together. In such cases, the risk of poor involvement by the father is probably higher than in that of separated, previously married parents.

Given that access to children can become the subject of legal battles, surely it is also time to allow the media to report proceedings in the family courts without identifying the participants? A recent report by Ireland's court reporter, Dr Carol Coulter, found that most issues of access to the children are settled amicably and without a court appearance. But some separated fathers responded that this is because men feel they will get a raw deal from the court and that they have no option but to settle on the steps, perhaps for less access than they really want. The way to settle the argument is to allow the media into the family courts.

But the overall message from this week’s Barnardos report is that such old-fashioned human qualities as love, caring and warmth really do make a difference to children and to the adults they become.

Related post:

Quiklink: Barnardos' 'Da Project' highlights important role of fathers in childrens' lives