WE MAY one day acknowledge a huge debt to the chairwoman of the National Women's Council, Ms Noreen Byrne, for doing us the favour of making the invisible visible.
In a recent Newsweek article on the growth of single motherhood and the "death of marriage" in Europe, Ms Byrne was quoted as saying: "The feeling is, why bother to live with them [i.e. men] and wash their socks? Just go out and play with them." A lot of women, she added, "are deciding they don't need men to survive".
At first sight, these comments appeared to reflect the predictable triumphalism of one who delights that she has won the war against men and driven them back to their caves. In last Thursday's Irish Times, Ms Byrne told us what she had meant to say, placing what might have been taken for the light heartedness of her original sentiments into politically correct language. In doing so, she expressed the even more ominous irresponsibility of her views.
In both articles, Ms Byrne celebrated the winner taking all: independence, freedom, yes, but more importantly the "ownership" of children.
She began by welcoming the opportunity "to make a few serious points on the rights and responsibilities of men and women in relation to each other and to their children, whether jointly or separately". In fact, she placed much emphasis on the rights of women, and the responsibilities/ irresponsibility of men, but none at all on the responsibilities of women or the rights of men or children.
"Some women are choosing to stay on their own and they can clearly explain why they do not want to live with a man, married to him or otherwise," she wrote, evidence that "Ireland is changing and becoming more pluralist, embracing diversity in many different ways".
Did Ms Byrne have anything to say of the rights of the children affected by the liberating choices of their mothers? No. She was concerned only with the rights of their mothers to do as they "choose". Women, and women alone, it appears, have the right to adjudicate on the correctness of these choices. Women "can clearly explain" such choices - further evidence of "pluralism" and "diversity".
THE question of choices which might be made in the interests of children, still less of fathers, does not, it appears, arise. But in case it might occur to the less politically correct reader, Ms Byrne reminded us that "much of the tolerance of previous generations of abuse, violence, meanness and mental cruelty to women, is going"; a subtle way of summoning up the idea that the pluralist choices of women always have an irrefutable moral basis.
She expanded: "Many single women are choosing to keep their babies, and many other women are finding themselves or choosing to be, the resident parent [my italics]." This implies, first of all, that Ms Byrne believes that a child is a chattel, the property of its mother. Moreover, her choice of language again reminded the casual reader that women, as always, are martyrs to their children: they "choose" to look after their children, or "find themselves" doing so. The implication is that, yet again, men have wilfully evaded their responsibilities.
Only someone who is being disingenuous or is ignorant of the truth about this modern pluralist State could have written this. Ninety per cent of separations in Ireland result in the mother gaining full custody of the children.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, this occurs not on account of the abuse, violence, cruelty or meanness of men, but because our culture and legal system are heavily biased in favour of women as the primary carers for children. Even if a man could prove that the mother of his child was herself violent, cruel, abusive and mean, it would make no difference.
Furthermore, having gained full custody of the children, the woman is then given virtually total licence to dole out what is termed "access" between the children and their father, provided of course that the father continues to behave in a manner pleasing to the mother.
She can decide how much time he and his children spend together and when and where this time is spent. To acquire this right, she does not have to prove the father has been violent, abusive, cruel or mean; simply that he is a man and she a woman. Women make "critical assessments" and "opt" for things; men have few choices, children still fewer. Most separated fathers know their children at the whim of the mothers: unmarried fathers count themselves lucky to know their children at all.
To conceal from us the doublethink inherent in her worldview, it was necessary for Ms Byrne to remind us what a bunch of bastards men have tended to be. The "circumstances and experience" which have led women to make the kind of "choices" she celebrates "have coloured their views of men". Only men do wrong. Only men - are in the dock. And only women will decide their - guilt and punishment.
"AND please," she pleaded, "we all know that it is not a reaction against those men reading this column who are good, caring, responsible and loyal and who engage in relationships with women as equal partners and coparents."
This is the mandatory "congratulations on stopping beating your wife" clause, designed primarily to distract the woolly headed or undersexed male from the illogicality of the argument.
"This," she stressed, "is about men who women observe and experience [my italics] as at best irresponsible, at worst abusive." Women observe, and on observing decide, and on deciding reserve the right to banish men from the sight of their own children.
Ms Byrne has a solution: education. Education for whom? For men, of course. Men have not been sufficiently prepared for the changes arising from the new pluralist Ireland, and in particular for the need for "greater equality within relationships".
This would seem uncontroversial except that it is clear that what Ms Byrne desires is not greater equality but a more "pluralist" form of inequality, in which women hold all the cards. Men need to learn to accept their lot in the new order in the way women accepted theirs in the old.
"Society," declared Noreen Byrne, "is paying an exceedingly high price for failing to deal with complex issues through complex responses in policies across the board." This is true, and is largely the result of thinking such as that voiced by Ms Byrne herself. One thing is sure: in 20 years' time, the children now forced to grow up without the love of their fathers will not be so blase' about the consequences of the present obscene situation.
Only a generation reared in the complacency generated by a functioning though much derided nuclear family culture could be so sanguine about its collapse.