`Consensus" is a funny thing. Although it is the jealously guarded property of an opinion-forming elite - which can apply it cruelly against transgressors - that elite in Ireland is so small that it is readily and quickly swayed into new consensus positions.
Thus, for example, the national consensus about abortion is unrecognisable from the one that applied seven years ago. Republican politics get a hearing from Official Ireland unimaginable less than five years ago. And perhaps most remarkably, without anything resembling an X case or a peace process, dogged campaigners such as John Waters and the men from Parental Equality have shaped a new consensus on fatherhood.
Nowadays when the issue comes up, however vigorous the debate seems to be, we can be sure of at least hearing lip service for "the plight of the separated/unmarried father". Pity for a previously unknown oppressed group flows even from dedicated feminists. More extraordinarily, the profoundly counter-intuitive argument that an infant emerges from a woman's body possessing two completely equal parents is now widely regarded as a logical basis for changes in law and social policy.
Now this seismic movement in our thinking about fathers and families has a theoretical handbook, Changing Fathers? In the likely event that the Parental Equality lobby eventually finds a cause celebre that thrusts the issue further up the public and media agenda, authors Kieran McKeown, Harry Ferguson and Dermot Rooney have even prepared the bare bones of - God help us - a constitutional amendment:
"Within the Constitution, we favour a declaration which enshrines the equal rights of father and mother to the guardianship of their child where the child is conceived through consent, irrespective of whether both parents live together."
McKeown proudly identifies himself as the author of that passage. "My belief is that it takes two people to conceive a child," he says. "In an ideal world, both those parents should acknowledge the bond that both have with the child. Neither should be in a position to interfere with that bond."
He's also happy with the company he keeps. "I'd have no dispute with the substance of John Waters's argument, though I'd have some problems with his tone." Waters and Parental Equality have highlighted "the gross injustice many fathers suffer" when seeking access or guardianship of their children. This is the debate that Changing Fathers? willingly walks in on; and the book will certainly be employed against some mothers who reckon they are in the best position to guide their children's lives and decide what sort of relationship with fathers is in their children's interest.
However, the book does have a broader, less partisan agenda. The changes wrought by the women's movement, the culture's heightened expectations of parents and the conviction - borne of the authors' years of involvement in men's groups - that men really care about active fathering combine ambitiously in its pages.
The question mark in the title is a matter of "studied ambiguity", McKeown says - partly because it's unclear if fathers are really changing all that much, and partly because, he says: "I do not have a mission to change fathers. That would be the height of arrogance. Maybe to invite fathers to reflect on their lives and then make the changes they see as appropriate.
"As women have come to realise that being a mother only can make you a half-person, men are realising that being a worker only can make you a half-person." He conjures a happy image of "men and women passing in the hall, each on to their way to developing their other half".
While he says the traditional male "provider" role has been stigmatised - "as if it's selfish" - he welcomes the benefits for men, women and children of a more "involved" model of fathering. "My father missed out on that kind of experience. As a son I missed out on it too. At one time I was cross about that: why didn't my father do for me what I do with my kids?"
He came to understand, he says, that his father was working under "different rules" than the ones that apply to his own relationship with Colm (16) and 14-year-old twins Cara and Caitriona. Loath to appear smug, he admits: "Personally, I'm kind of happy with the kind of father I've been."
The book's publicist describes McKeown as a "house dad", but that's pushing it. He indeed works from his home on Dublin's northside, full-time, as a research consultant. His wife Grace works from home too, parttime, in the same business.
"In some ways it's quite a traditional arrangement," he says. "During the week Grace would make the dinners and so on." But he's happy that being at home through their children's childhoods has meant a "presence with the children" he mightn't otherwise have had. As it happens, McKeown's own domestic arrangement dovetails with the arguments advanced about housework in Changing Fathers? The intriguing chapter on the subject cites recent research on radical discrepancies between men and women in the performance of household duties - discrepancies that persist even when both parents are working outside the home. However, the book suggests that a feminist view of this gender imbalance, which sees it as an injustice, may be missing a crucial point: perhaps this division of labour is the result of parents' "negotiation . . . taking into account work and other circumstances". Changing Fathers? points to the same survey which produced those dramatic tables also revealing that 70 per cent of women were "happy" with the housework arrangement. (To all of which one unsurveyed mother replies: " `Happy'? Well, it's better than bickering.")
According to McKeown, "Grace and I work on the premise that all work is work. Paid work is not more valuable than housework. As a rule, both of us work the same amount. I wouldn't be sitting watching the television while she's making the dinner, for example." He routinely does the after-dinner clean-up, he adds. Changing Fathers? is "for an informed readership," McKeown says: "academics, policy-makers, professionals - Irish Times readers." In the cause of vindicating fatherhood, it wades through the unconscious with Freud and Lacan as well as through social-scientific literature on fathers' impact. These investigations lead to few glib conclusions. The psychoanalytical material essentially posits the need for an "other" to facilitate the psycho-sexual separation of mother and child. However, as McKeown acknowledges, "that can be an auntie or a minder" rather than the father.
Given the authors' honesty and sophistication with this sort of would-be supporting material, it's hard not to conclude that the most solid pillar of the pro-equality argument is metaphysical: a child's crucial point of origin is the indisputably collaborative act of conception rather than the unavoidably solitary process of childbirth. And where have we heard that before?
Changing Fathers? is about changing society, not just the bureaucratic and legal structures that hinder a small, noisy minority of fathers, but also the workplace practices, antenatal routines etc that block most men's route to the fuller, more fulfilling parenting that is in everyone's interest. Fathers must also contend with the culture's symbolic undervaluing of fathers, depicting them as uniformly foolish - and worse.
McKeown sees recent revelations about sexual abuse, while necessary, as contributing to this difficult atmosphere. "As a man and a father I've been affected, because part of the image now of a man and a father is of someone's who's dangerous. "I want to say that men are basically good. It seems a crazy thing to have to do."
Changing Fathers? is published today by Collins Press, Cork (£8.99)
