Reform of the family law system: Guardianship rights for all fathers

In Digging, one of Seamus Heaney’s most memorable poems, he writes about watching his father “stooping in rhythm through potato drills” and concludes: “By God, the old man could handle a spade/Just like his old man.”

His father inspired him to perform a different kind of excavation: “Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./I’ll dig with it.” As the poet attests, fathers can inspire as well as love and nurture so why is it that the Irish legal system is so cruel to them?