David QuinnThe Children and Family Bill shows this Government no longer believes in marriage, writes David Quinn
Enda Kenny is presenting the Children and Family Bill as a much-needed piece of reform that is a response to growing ‘family diversity’ and the need to give ‘legal certainty’ to the lives of children created through the likes of In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF), and to their parents as well.
Opposition parties are supporting the bill and are fully conspiring with the Government to rush this very important piece of legislation through the Oireachtas without any proper public debate, even though the bill, over time, will affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Why are they rushing it through? Basically, because they want to keep the same-sex marriage lobby happy. They want it passed before the upcoming referendum so they can say (erroneously) to those of us who are against redefining marriage that the referendum has nothing to do with children.
Why will the bill affect the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people? Well, consider this for a start. One thing it will allow is more access rights for grandparents to their grandchildren. On balance this is a good development, but consider why it is deemed necessary.
Breakdown
In the Ireland of today, marital breakdown is relatively common. Someone’s son might get divorced. His ex-wife will almost certainly be given custody of any children they might have. This means his parents, the children’s paternal grandparents might hardly ever get to see their grandchildren anymore.
As I understand it, the bill will allow those grandparents to apply for access to those children so they can see them more often.
As I say, on balance, this is a good thing. The downside is that it subjects the children to another set of legal orders and makes their lives still more complicated. Now they live with the mother by court order, live with the father a certain number of days per month by court order and now will see their paternal grandparents every now and then by court order.
The bill also gives grandparents the right to apply to become legal guardians of their grandchildren. This could be when their own daughter is a single mother and is living in the same house as her parents, the child’s grandparents.
The grandparents will be in practice acting as parent figures to the child but without any legal relationship with the child. This bill will allow for a legal relationship to be created in these kinds of scenarios through changes to guardianship law.
And what about unmarried fathers? At the moment, only married fathers are automatically made legal parents (‘guardians’) of their children – an unmarried father has to apply for guardianship.
Why this difference in treatment? It’s because the married man has shown his commitment both to the mother of his child and to the child by virtue of being married.
The commitment of the unmarried father can’t be taken for granted. He might be very committed or not, as the case may be. This means he has to apply for guardianship.
The new law will give him improved guardianship rights if he has been living with the mother of his child for a certain length of time including for at least three months after the birth of the child.
Response
In this article, I don’t intend looking at what the Bill is doing to our adoption law – it is allowing same-sex couples to adopt – or to our laws in respect of IVF and other forms of Assisted Human Reproduction. (I’ve done that in this paper before and will write about it again.)
I’m concentrating instead on the other aspects of the bill and what they are a response to.
The Government presents them as a response to ‘reality’. This is true up to a point. But what is the reality the Government is referring to? The reality is growing family breakdown.
The various situations referred to above all have this in common; a disconnect between the father and the child.
This is why the paternal grandparents might have to apply for access to their grandchildren. It’s because the grandchildren are no longer living with their son.
In the case of grandparents having to apply for guardianship of their grandchild, it will commonly be due to the fact that the father of their grandchild never married the mother or never applied to become a guardian of his own children. Therefore, the grandparents have to step into the breach.
Likewise, the Government wants to strengthen guardianship rights for unmarried fathers precisely because so many fathers are now unmarried.
While aspects of the bill are necessary, it would be far better if the Government worked much harder to strengthen marriage itself.
That is, it would be better if it worked harder to arrest marital breakdown and to encourage parents to marry who already have children and encouraged others who plan to have children to marry first.
Why do this? Because marriage is indisputably the best way to connect fathers to their children and to the mothers of their children.
The fact that the Government and the opposition parties can’t see this, or couldn’t be bothered to see it means that despite all their talk about same-sex marriage, they no longer really believe in marriage. This is extremely bad news, for children above all.