References to parenthood reveal nothing about victims and their lives

THE Irish, in the early years of the 21st century, devoted their weekends to killing each other, using guns, knives or cars.

That’s the conclusion scholars from another planet will make, a couple of centuries down the line, when they come to investigate why our world ceased to support human life.

They’ll go through the yellowing newspaper files and the radio news tapes and the conclusion will be inescapable: yes, these Irish people regarded Saturday and Sunday as open season on killing each other.

But future scholars will also be puzzled by the references, in the stories about our lethal weekend rituals, to paternity and maternity.

Typically, they may read of a man stabbed in a particular city, and note that the report solemnly announces, perhaps in headlines, that the man was a father of three.

Similarly, in telling the story of the woman whose car went out of control and stuck itself to a lamppost, killing her, the report will add that the lone driver was a mother of two.

They will not say that the dead man rarely drew a sober breath, had a cholesterol level off the scale, or was a killer Scrabble player, although any one of these things tells you more about the guy than mere fatherhood does.

They will not say, about the dead woman, that she owned a Fendi handbag, was planning to walk some mountain range to help Ronan Keating fight cancer, or was the sole support of her widowed mother, although any one of these would tell you more about her than is revealed by the notification of maternal status.

Why on earth do we qualify people who figure in news stories by reference to their fertility? Is it that we feel parenthood in some way makes people more human, more worthwhile, more worthy of sympathy if they are the victim of violence or of circumstances?

An ad on radio pushes this notion in a teeth-grinding way, suggesting that when you start having kids, you move from being a self-destructive, self-absorbed, high-spending hedonist to being a selfless, disciplined, public-spirited, financially cautious good citizen.

The copy-writer of the ad obviously knows more about the transformative nature of paternity and maternity than do the rest of us.

On the other hand, maybe the mentions of motherhood and fatherhood are supposed to give an extra frisson of shock and awe: imagine, yer man got done for having a briefcase full of heroin, and him a father of four.

Shame on him.

Although — have you noticed? — these references don’t seem to go the whole generational distance. Reports never say “Buggins, a father of six and grandfather of eighteen.”

No, it’s only direct offspring that are assumed to demonstrate something about their progenitor.

The problem is we’re never told what the existence of descendents actually says about the parent.

You could have a drug dealer, for example, who is a father of four, who disputed parentage in one case, abandoned a second baby at birth and hasn’t talked to the twins since they nicked some of his ill-gotten gains and headed off to Australia.

Once you get that kind of information, you have a real perception of the individual, whereas simple assertion of parenthood tells you nothing and may actually serve to mislead, because of popular culture’s view of parenting as a self-improvement device.

The belief that parenthood changes you into a near-saint is complete garbage, although we all feel better for buying into the myth that motherhood, in particular, makes you a better person and softer around the edges.

Tell that to the Spartan soccer mums who used to send their sons off to war with the cheery instruction to come back with their shield. Or on it.

Tell it to Medea. Tell it to the centuries of Irish women who fostered out their children because somebody (wrongly) decided that if tribal leaders swapped their kids early and raised the other clan leader’s heirs as their own, they’d be less likely to fight with each other.

Mostly, what you get from parenthood is exhaustion and high anxiety. In those first five months when you think you’re never going to get a full night’s sleep ever again, I had nightmares where I’d mislaid my baby son through culpable inattention to detail and had to go to the CIE Lost Property Office to see if he’d been handed in.

The chances were small, since I never travelled by bus, but I had done a story, as a cub reporter, about the Lost Property Office, so it became, for my subconscious, the place to go if you lost any vital part of your life.

In the dream, the CIE people always had an assortment of babies, neatly stored feet- downward in a device like a circular umbrella holder you could spin until you spotted the right one.

It always surprised me that parents who had mislaid their offspring didn’t — in the dream — pick better-looking ones when they had the chance, but no, everybody wanted their very own baby.

The thing about parenthood is that it’s often inadvertent, ergo says damn-all about the individual, whereas other life choices, by the nature of the thought process and financial cost implicit in their achievement, say quite a lot about the person in the headlines.

For example, I know at least one man who is closer, in every sense, to his toupee than he is to any blood relative.

If his son went off for the weekend and left no note about his whereabouts, this man would be mildly concerned.

If his toupee disappeared, however, his very identity and self-image would be challenged.

But we never see reports saying, “Toupee wearer charged with cannabis possession.” If he’s done for hash, it’ll be his son who’ll get a mention, not his sliding roof.

Unless the numbers are particularly impressive or ironic (“Father of 15 admits condom theft”), parenthood illustrates less about the parent than even pet ownership does.

Admit it: the minute someone is described as owning two Labrador puppies, you just know there’s no harm in them. On the other hand, a person described as owning a fully grown pit bull with a rottweiler on the side is not someone you want to meet in a narrow lane on a dark night.

We categorise people as dog people or cat people or owners of aquariums the size of a conservatory filled with spectacularly exhibitionist fish.

We like or dislike gamblers, roller-bladers or TDs.

But parents?

The constant reference to parenthood in stories about accidental and non-accidental death is a leftover.

An echo of a time when any woman appearing on a radio programme claiming to have mothered eight or 10 children was sure of a round of applause that would let her die happy.

It needs to be done away with, if only for the childless and child-free, who are made to sound unloved, if not totally redundant, by comparison.