Four domestic violence orders were given to two sets of couples against each other at the Dublin District Family Court yesterday.
The four were among 37 cases involving domestic violence before three judges sitting at Dolphin House.
The first of the four cross-over orders was granted to a father who appeared in the morning and made an ex-parte application, with only him present. He said his wife had hit him with an iron at the weekend.
He told Judge Michael Coghlan he and his wife were separated, but lived in the same house. He was playing with their two small children, a boy and a girl, in the front room and his wife was hoovering and asked him to move a bag and a football.
He said he would when he was finished and his wife started shouting. He then took the gear with the help of his young son out to his car. He said his wife dragged the boy inside and then locked him out.
He managed to get back into the house by climbing through an upstairs bedroom window.
Pushed
She came up to the bedroom and asked him for the key to the side door of the house, but he refused. She pushed him and tried to get the key from his pocket.
He tried to capture what she was doing on camcorder, he said, but the machine wouldn’t work.
The iron was in the room, she picked it up and swung it, hitting him, he said. He tried to take the iron from her, but she bit him.
“If the children weren’t there, I’d be out of there,” he said.
He said his wife tried to set the children against him. His little girl might be on his knee, but when she heard her mother coming she would jump off. And his little boy would shout “I love you mummy” if he heard her outside the door. He said he showed the bite marks to gardaí, but they didn’t want to get involved.
Judge Coghlan granted a protection order for 10 days, requiring the man’s wife not to use violence or threaten to use violence against him.
In the afternoon, the man’s wife appeared and sought an ex-parte protection order of her own. The judge read a written statement she provided and then asked her why she had sought keys to the side door.
The woman said her husband always kept them in his pocket; it was a control thing, she said.
Called gardaí
“Did you ever lock him out?” the judge asked. She admitted she had, but said she was the one who called gardaí to the house.
She said her two young children were terrified of him. “He comes and pretends to be Mr Nice Guy … but according to him, he owns me,” she said.
Judge Coghlan said it appeared both parties had been screaming and shouting and were behaving “not in the best interests of the children”. He granted the protection order for 10 days but warned the woman to tread carefully before the next court date when the matter would be fully heard.
In a separate case, former partners applied for maintenance, guardianship and access orders, and for safety orders against each other. They also had two young children.
The mother’s solicitor claimed the father had recently breached a protection order while the mother was at a hospital. The father, who was not legally represented, claimed the mother had been violent towards him.
After deciding on access, the judge said he wanted the hand-over in a public place to be “all sweetness and light”.
He granted both safety orders for four months, to “dampen down everybody’s ardour”, he said.
