State violates fathers’ rights
As we have recounted many times, the rights of a married father are considerable. Under the constitution he has full custody of his children, so he can provide for them and protect them and the state cannot interfere unless the father disentitles himself by abandonment of this duty.
Unfortunately, this has not prevented the state from gross violations of these rights, to the extent that married fathers are being treated as debt-bonded slaves and no remedy in the practice of law is being allowed them to protect their children, even in a situation where their wives are encouraged to desert them and take their children from the family home without their consent.
So why does anyone think, even if the state was to grant some obviously much lesser rights to unmarried fathers, that it would not just use this as a further opportunity to make them liable for the financial support of the mother of their children.
The reality is that a large number of unmarried couples have never lived together, so the father cannot be held legally liable for paying maintenance because he cannot be deemed to have 'failed' to maintain his children if he never had the opportunity to do so.
There is no method by which a single man can be legally classified as the father of a child if the mother refuses to comply with DNA or blood tests, unless the state intends forcibly to test her and the baby, so how will a single man claim these new so-called rights?
Sadly, this must be seen as yet another ploy by the state designed purely, if you read the text of the minister's speech carefully, to encourage unsuspecting and trusting unmarried men to support the state's desire to remove married fathers' constitutional rights that the state is already violating.
The constitution exists specifically to protect the rights of the people from interference by the state. It is a questionable exercise therefore when the state itself, without prompting from the people, initiates changes to the constitution which will reduce the ability of families to protect themselves from the state.
It is scurrilous of the minister to raise false hopes among single men like this merely as a cover to promote the state's own agenda to undermine marriage.
Men and women who are truly concerned for the welfare of children must rebut this subterfuge and insist on retaining and vindicating the family rights recognised in the constitution because, in reality, only married fathers are in a position to protect their children from interference by the state.
Roger Eldridge
Chairman
National Men's Council of Ireland
Knockvicar
Boyle
Co Roscommon
