Crowley And Waters - Village Magazine

 — village gender special December 2009 - January 2010

Driven by rights – John Waters and Niall Crowley

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

From: John Waters

To: Niall Crowley

Subject: Village

Hello Niall,

Before we begin, allow me to thank you for

engaging in this discussion. My objective is

to try to get at something I think important

rather than create vast reserves of heat.

My opening question, which I’ll outline

in an attempt to deﬁne the central issue as I

see it, relates to the concept of “equality” as

referred to in contemporary socio-ideolog-

ical discourse. I don’t mean the dictionary

deﬁnition, with which I have no quarrel. My

problem, as someone who has for many years

written about issues aﬀecting men, women

and children, is that “equality”, as politically

deﬁned in contemporary society, is a con-

struct that excludes men. You and I have had

various ding-dongs in public about this and

always seemed to end up in a fruitless discus-

sion about, for example, how many men the

Equality Authority had represented under

diﬀerent headings while you were CEO. My

point was, and remains, that those who pro-

mote the so-called equality agenda do not

see men - as men - as in any way qualifying as

potential beneﬁciaries of their interventions.

On the contrary, in many instances they see

men as the demographic and human entity

at whose expense this concept of “equality”

is to be furthered. Now, I have no problem

with the idea that equality, by its very nature,

implies an evening-out. In any given area,

where there has been an uneven distribution

of beneﬁts, it is right that this be corrected.

But, where men are concerned, there appears

to be no area in which this concept is deemed

to exist to favour them and particular of their

key needs as men.

Most of this argument happens in a land-

scape in which a new division of labour and

responsibilities is being negotiated. Since

we are in a period of adjustment and indeed

of transition, there has been an enormous

amount of intervention on behalf of women,

to correct a situation whereby it was more

diﬃcult than it should have been for women,

generally speaking, to work outside the home.

Nobody objects to this. But there has been no

interest whatsoever in looking at the other

side of this equation, which has been greatly

disrupted by recent developments. The do-

mestic sphere – family relationships - has

in recent decades been subject to enormous

change, particularly in the context of the

growing fragility of male-female relationships,

and this mainly rebounds to the detriment of

men in their role as fathers. My postbag over

many years has indicated that men are in-

creasingly brutalized in situations where the

State intervenes to make and enforce solu-

tions when a family breaks down. As a result,

there is a range of headings under which male

human beings are grotesquely discriminated

against: the family courts, social work policy,

domestic violence policy, as well as in more

general contexts where discrimination exists

for other reasons, like health resources and so

on. It is bizarre that these issues have not yet

broken above ground. Either bodies like the

Equality Authority do not attract complaints

from men on these issues; or they are receiv-

ing and suppressing them. I am hard pressed

to say which of the two I would consider the

more grave situation.

Having written about these matters since

the mid-1990s, I have never encountered

among those who have become known for

promoting what is called “equality”, any pre-

paredness even to acknowledge that inequali-

ties have developed on the other side of the

so-called “gender” equation. Indeed, study-

ing your own reports as CEO of the Equal-

ity Authority over many years, I have always

been struck by the fact that, when you got to

the heading (which to my ﬂeeting exhilara-

tion you always did) “Equality and Men”, your

analysis invariably went on to replicate your

previous cataloguing of society’s wrongs

against women. “Equality” for men, you

made quite clear, was “equality for women” in

another guise.

Kind regards,

John

From: Niall Crowley

To: John Waters

Subject: Village

Dear John,

Thank you for the opportunity to exchange

with you in this manner.

You say that equality is a construct that

excludes men. You refer to dictionary deﬁ-

nitions and political deﬁnitions of equality.

However, you don’t give your own deﬁnition

and, as such, it is diﬃcult to explore this issue

with you.

It is useful to start by moving away from

constructs and looking at realities - the real-

ity of the experience of inequality. Inequal-

ity ﬁnds expression across four inter-linked

areas of access to resources, inﬂuence, status

and caring relationships.

In the area of resources women experi-

ence a large gender pay gap. Women are con-

centrated in low paid, low status and part time

occupations. The 5% of the population who

hold 40% of the wealth are predominantly

men.In the area of inﬂuence it is women who

are under-represented in the Dail, local au-

thorities, the judiciary and senior manage-

ment in the public and private sectors. The

lower status and standing of women is evident

in the sexual objectiﬁcation of, and persistent

  

Are women’s rights being asserted to the detriment of men’s?

An email debate moderated by Village

PHOTOS: SIMON O’CONNOR

 Equality debate

 — village gender special December 2009 - January 2010

 Equality debate

stereotyping of women as passive, dependent

and nurturing. In the caring domain women

continue to take on the bulk of unpaid work,

in particular caring responsibilities and

household chores. In terms of access to car-

ing relationships it is predominantly women

who experience physical and other forms of

abuse from men - domestic violence, rape,

traﬃcking and prostitution.

The reality is that equality is not a con-

struct that excludes men. Inequality is a real-

ity for women. Equality is the necessary and

urgent construct to eliminate this inequality.

It is also relevant to remember that men will

also be the beneﬁciaries of this equality as will

the wider society.

When you make a suggestion that the

Equality Authority might suppress discrimi-

nation claims from men and when you label

men’s experiences as grotesque you are taking

on a role as a proponent of backlash.

Men and men’s organisations working on

men’s issues can, and have, made a valuable

contribution to the wellbeing of men. Valu-

able initiatives have been taken in response

to male suicide, early school leaving among

boys, rural isolation of men and the disadvan-

tages that accrue to men from the machismo

required in this gender unequal society. The

language and approach of your intervention

place you in a very diﬀerent tradition - that

of men and men’s organisations who promote

backlash.

Backlash tries to tell us that equality has

gone too far when it remains a distant aspi-

ration, that equality does not beneﬁt men

when it clearly could, or that the dominant

group are actually the real victims of in-

equality when they are not. Backlash is not

a reaction to change or to the achievement

of equality by women. It is a reaction to the

promise of change. It is in eﬀect a defence of

male dominance.

A key tool of backlash is to pose men as the

real victims of gender inequality. One exam-

ple of this lies in your exaggerated language

in relation to men’s experience of domestic

violence. Some men do experience domestic

violence. It would be inaccurate however not

to acknowledge that the vast bulk of domes-

tic violence in our society is experienced by

women. Some men and some men’s organi-

sations have, somewhat dishonestly tried to

deny this. However, we need to be clear that

domestic violence is a particular phenomenon

where the objective of the perpetrator is to

control the victim. It is not about two people

in an intimate relationship being in conﬂict.

To establish the reality of domestic violence

you have to take account of the level of injury,

the level of control excercised, and the level

of fear and powerlessness of the person being

abused. When looked at with this clarity and

precision it is clear that most of the claims

made by men’s organisations about this issue

lie outside of the ﬁeld of domestic violence.

Reconﬁguring the truth to pose men as the

real victims of gender inequality only serves

male dominance. Is this then what the debate

on equality is to become - an eﬀort to main-

tain an unjust status quo, rather than an ex-

amination of valuable concepts and unaccept-

able realities?

Niall

From: John Waters

To: Niall Crowley

Subject: Village

Dear Niall,

The tone and thrust of your response serves

to vindicate my argument, to an extent that

quite shocks me. I had expected at least some

token protestations about your commitment,

when you were CEO of the Equality Author-

ity, to a genuine, by which I mean dictionary-

deﬁned concept of equality (I’ll come back to

that). But your instantaneous summoning-up

of this concept of “backlash” not merely re-

veals your hand a little earlier than I expected

but indeed answers pretty much all my ques-

tions. Right until reading your response, I

had, I have to admit, retained a lingering

sense that, deep down, Niall Crowley was on

the side of the angels. On the occasions when

we discussed these issues, I always found you

aﬀable, courteous and seemingly anxious to

help if you could, though I always came away

feeling that I had been smothered in words. I

would go to you with a simple question – why,

for example, does the Equality Authority not

support men who have been unjustly treated

by family courts? I would come away some-

what dazed, unsure whether you were saying

that the law did not allow you to do it or that

no man had ever asked you to do it. But, deep

down, I felt sure of your good intentions, and

would always resolve to be on the lookout for

a suitable case that might enable us to make a

little history.

But your persistent and obsessive ref-

erence in this response to this odd idea of

“backlash” brings a clarity to the matter that

leaves no room for optimism. The concept

is, of course, instantly recognizable as the

equivalent of some familiar ideological con-

structs – “counter-revolutionary activities”;

“enemies of the working class”, etc. It conjures

up an enemy in a way that serves two func-

tions simultaneously: it deﬂects any potential

questioning of the progress of the “revolution”

and seeks to change the terms of the debate.

My question was about men, which is

to say real live, breathing, loving, working,

laughing, adult male human beings. But you,

it is clear, see something else: a horde of bar-

barians at the gate seeking to tear down your

ideological citadel.

Thus, your response not merely conﬁrms

my worst fears, but in doing so brings the

debate to a shuddering halt for me. I have

my answer: you do not wish your concept of

equality to become available to men. This

places beyond recall any residual hopes I

might have had that you were frustrated by

the law or the lack of suitable cases in your

desire to promote a genuine concept of equal-

ity. In this 700-word response you lay bare

“A key tool of

backlash is to

pose men as

the real victims

of gender

inequality”





your thinking, proving a vivid insight into the

mentality that clearly governed your period as

CEO of the Equality Authority. Your response

is deeply eloquent about how you see the

equality project and how you see men ﬁtting

into it. Men, for you, are not really human

beings, but representatives of an ideological

opposition, backlashers who might seek at

any time to undo your crusade. This explains

for me why you could never bring yourself to

champion the case of a man brutally deprived

of the society of his children, or to ask why it

really is that the vast majority of suicides are

by men. Any man in pain who came knock-

ing on your door would have immediately re-

vealed himself as the backlashing stooge of a

counter-revolutionary conspiracy of lashers-

back, intent upon tearing down your State-

sponsored revolution.

I am not now nor have I ever been a mem-

ber of a men’s group or organization, lash-

erbacks or otherwise. I am a journalist and

writer who writes about what he encounters.

I do not see the world through an ideologi-

cal gauze, but as the human drama in which

the nature of men and women is deﬁned not

by academic texts but what actually is, what

the community ordains and, most of all, by

the force of nature, red in tooth and claw. I

am not a backerlasher, a lasher-of-backs or a

backers-of-lashes. I do, of course, recognize

the tactic and indeed recall it from my early

attempts to raise these issues in the 1990s. I

recognize, too, that it is a hermetically-sealed

device which becomes its own proof, so there

is little point in my expending energy trying

to answer it. It is a tactic designed for the

consumption of those already in the loop, to

marshal their energies against the possibil-

ity of a challenge, but also to demonise the

challenger from the outset. It worked well for

Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Joseph McCarthy, so

why not for Niall Crowley?

But I come back to my question: why are

men – by which I mean any one individual

man, or the sprawling legions of wounded

men who ﬁnd themselves in sometimes fatal

trouble in our society – not entitled to avail

of your concept of equality? You have already

conﬁrmed that they are not, and now I wish

only to ask: why? Here, I take out my diction-

ary, which deﬁnes “equality” as: “the state

of being equal”; and “equal” as (the relevant

entry in this connection, I believe): “having

identical privileges, rights, status, etc.”.

In another familiar tactic, you immediately

hold aloft a straw man: the idea that “equality”

is a zero sum game in which women will lose

by every concession of fairness or justice to a

man. Nonsense, naturally. A man’s love for

his child, or a child’s love for her father, is not

a resource to be divided between the father

and the mother, any more than the mother’s

love for the same child, or the child’s love for

the mother, is a matter to be divided up like

furniture. It would be possible for those in

charge of the equality agenda to promote con-

ditions in which the mutual bonds of father

and children could be nurtured and protected

by society and its agencies, rather than sun-

dered and brutalized as at present, without in

any way diluting the intensity of their revolu-

tionary programme. But you have chosen not

merely to decline men access to justice and

equality, but to suggest that even to propose

that you might have had such a responsibility

as CEO of the “Equality” Authority, is an at-

tempt to drive women back to the sculleries

and the boudoirs.

Arguably the most fundamental denial of

equality in this society right now arises from

the fact that a single father, by virtue of a

historical interpretation of the Constitution

rooted in the deepest prejudice, has no auto-

matic right to be named as a Guardian of his

own child, but must either get the mother’s

support for his Guardianship or go to court

and make his case to a judge. This means that,

unless a mother is prepared to make a conces-

sion, an unmarried father has no legal stand-

ing in the life of his own child. This results in

widespread abuses of some of the most funda-

mental of human rights, as well as avoidable

trauma to both fathers and children, and an

State-operated ransom system which bleeds

good fathers dry. These grotesque abuses will

have profound consequences into the coming

generations. Yet, the Equality Authority un-

der your stewardship had nothing whatever to

say about any of this, even though at the same

time you were enthusiastically supportive of

a demand for adoption rights for gay couples.

Perhaps you can explain to me the logic of

advocating an entitlement of two strangers

to adopt a man’s child, while remaining silent

on that man and that child’s right to the bond

and relationship that God/Creation/Nature/

The Stork/Richard Dawkins/Don’t know (Tick

as appropriate) has proposed? And here there

is actually something of a zero-sum game. For,

unlike the situation pertaining between fa-

thers and mothers – there is indeed a context

in which there exists a clear conﬂict between

what are self-evidently the natural rights of

two categories of citizen – fathers and chil-

dren -– and the arguably discretionary if not

entirely arbitrary “rights” being extended to

another, gays. Whose side does the so-called

“equality” lobby rush to? Not those whose nat-

ural rights are being trampled into the dust of

history but those who claim a fabricated enti-

tlement with little basis in reason and none in

nature, a “right” that in many instances will

be claimed at the expense of disenfranchised

children and their fathers.

No one group has a monopoly on inequal-

ity: some groups or individuals suﬀer inequal-

ity in some areas, others in diﬀerent ones.

The point of an equality agenda, surely, is to

address inequality wherever it occurs, rather

than to see the issue in terms of a contest

between groups. How, to put it another way,

could a genuine concept of equality “go too

far”? Genuine equality is simply enabled to

ﬁnd itself, like a string brought into tune. If

it “goes too far” it becomes, again, inequal-

ity, which is not the objective of anyone I have

encountered among the thousands of men

I have tried to help in 15 years of writing on

these issues.

“No one group has

a monopoly on

inequality”

 — village gender special December 2009 - January 2010

I thought the purpose of this exchange was

to discuss equality for men, but you have again

spoken only of equality for women. That ini-

tiative is proceeding apace and nobody that

I know of is seeking to stand in its way. Of

course, your purpose of invoking the back-

lash bogeyman is not purely to protect your

favoured cause but to imply that the battle

will require your presence and energies for a

long time yet. The truth is that, ideologically

speaking, you are a radical feminist whose

work begins and ends with the concerns not

of equality, nor even of women as human be-

ings, but of radical feminism which seeks to

use the incremental gains of your revolution

to punish men for what I believe Marx called

the “notorious crimes” of the past. Among

the problems with this approach is that you

end up punishing not those who were guilty

of such past crimes, but the innocents of the

present who just happen to share the sex of

the phantom patriarchs who continue to mo-

nopolise your waking hours.

Whenever I am challenged on these issues

nowadays – usually with some secondhand

version of a contrived straw-man argument

someone has come across in an attack by one

of your ideoloigical fellow-travellers – I have

found I can bring the discussion to a shudder-

ing halt with a simple question: have you any

sons? To imagine the backlashing bogeyman,

it is necessary to see in the mind’s eye the

oppressive patriarch of feminist legend, the

robed judge on his bench; the pinstriped mil-

lionaire in the back seat of his Bentley. But in-

voke instead the spotty teenager who strikes

an ironic pose as a defence against a world

that seems more threatening than anyone, in-

cluding his father, told him it might be, and it

becomes possible to restore the dictionary to

its proper place as the arbiter of the meanings

of words.

If we fully open up the domestic violence

debate, we risk swamping Village with sta-

tistics and counter-statistics. Again, I have

to concede that the position you outline is

the established one, carefully nurtured over

many years by determined use of propaganda.

I fully accept that what I say on this subject

appears, as your fellow-travelleres have many

time assured me say, “counter-intuitive”. But

since “counter-intuitive” is not the same as

“untrue”, I will brieﬂy repeat myself: every in-

dendent two-sex survey of domestic violence

the world over has concluded that about one-

third of domestic violence is initiated by men;

one-third by women, and one-third is mutual

violence.

I reach into my desktop folder and pull out

one cutting. A 2006 TCD study of patients at-

tending family doctors , published in the Eu-

ropean Journal of General Practice found that

52 per cent of men and 43 per cent of women

had experienced domestic violence. Dr Susan

Smith, one of the study’s authors, said that

it was “inappropriate to continue to address

this issue as solely a woman’s problem”.

But, really and truly, none of this is even

the point. The point is that if one man is the

victim of a bullying female, he is as entitled as

any woman to the protection of the law and

the support of the State. This protection and

support is not forthcoming, and the “equality”

agenda, far from seeking to bring us closer to

truth and decency, contrives to see every po-

tential client for its advocacy as the stooge of

some ﬁendish counter-revolution.

As for dishonesty, we will have to see what

the future brings. Your assertion that “we

need to be clear that domestic violence is a

particular phenomenon where the objective

of the perpetrator is to control the victim”

and “is not about two people in an intimate re-

lationship being in conﬂict” seems to me to be

yet another example of a hermetically-sealed

ideological position that refuses any response

that does not suit its logic. These are words

constructed in space without root or wire to

actually existing reality. Why should violence

be diﬀerent because it happens indoors rath-

er than out, or because the participants are

a woman and a man rather than two men or

two women? But if you decide, as you say you

have, that any man who claims he has been

the victim of domestic violence cannot be

so deﬁned on the basis of his maleness, then

there is clearly no point in us trying to argue

these issues at all. Your position is clearly

constructed to repel any suggestion or pro-

posal that does not ﬁt into your ideological

position. Anything else is “reconﬁguring the

truth”, and/or “an eﬀort to maintain an unjust

status quo”. You and I are therefore engaged

not in a genuine democratic exchange of opin-

ions, but a remake of Alice in Wonderland.

I will ask you again: do you believe that

men should be treated fairly and equally? Per-

haps it may prove possible to answer yes or no

without demonising me or returning to your

specialist subject.

Yours sincerely,

John Waters

From: Niall Crowley

To: John Waters

Subject: Village

Dear John

It is hard to know how to reply to that.

Where I am critical of your position you feel

demonised. When I seek to pose a challenge

you merely dismiss it as “a contrived straw-man

argument” whatever that might be. Argument

put forward for debate you can only see as some

form of tactic deemed too recognisable to merit

response. You cannot really be in any doubt

from what I wrote that I believe both men and

women should be treated equally and fairly.

You appear to limit debate on equality to

individual experiences, behaviours and atti-

tudes. Individual men can and do experience

unfairness and injustice as men. Such unfair-

ness and injustice can and should be addressed.

Individual men do experience domestic vio-

lence. These men should and do have access to

support and such violence should be eliminated.

Individual men do experience discrimination

on the gender ground. These men should and

do have access to supports such as those pro-

vided by the Equality Authority and any such

“I thought the

purpose of this

exchange was to

discuss equality

for men, but

you have again

spoken only

of equality for

women”

 Equality debate





discrimination should be eliminated.

There are however issues of scale that you

seek to deny. Hyperbole surely when you refer

to ‘the sprawling legions of wounded men who

ﬁnd themselves in sometimes fatal trouble in

our society’.

Inaccuracy when you suggest that ‘every

independent two-sex survey of domestic vio-

lence the world over has concluded that about

one third of domestic violence is initiated by

men, one third by women and one third is

mutual violence’. A brief look to The National

Crime Council and the ESRI report on domes-

tic abuse in Ireland in  contradicts this.

They found that % of women and % of men

have experienced severely abusive behaviour

from their partner at some time. Women were

over twice as likely as men to experience severe

physical abuse, nearly three times as likely to

experience severe emotional abuse and seven

times more likely to have experienced severe

sexual abuse. Women were ten times more

likely to require a stay in hospital after the expe-

rience of abuse.

Misleading surely when you raise the issue

of the Equality Authority not supporting ‘men

who have been unjustly treated by family

courts’. You must know by now that the Equal

Status Acts exempt any action that is required

under a court order. You must also be aware of

the Family Law Reporting Pilot Project which

reported to the Courts Service in . Dr.

Carol Coulter reported that the project ‘saw

no evidence of systematic bias against fathers

or anyone else in the courts’.

As regards your point on legal guardianship for

unmarried fathers, such issues fall, as you know,

outside the remit of the equality legislation and

therefore fall beyond the mandate of the Equality

Authority. You pose a number of issues in terms

of a failure by the Equality Authority to address

particular challenges. Yet, despite being aware of

the limitations, you never sought the necessary

changes to the scope and provisions of the equal-

ity legislation. Such an approach merely serves

to polarise the debate and divide initiative for

equality. The pursuit of men’s issues in a manner

that is divorced from, and even posed in competi-

tion with, achieving equality for women has also

served to polarise the debate. This diminishes

potential for progress that would advance equal-

ity for women and address these issues for men.

Again I believe your approach in these matters has

contributed to such a polarisation.

Issues of legal guardianship for unmarried

fathers should be addressed. These issues

should, if they are to be eﬀectively addressed,

be seen and understood in the context of the

structures and systems in our society that cre-

ate and sustain inequality for women. These

structures and systems do privilege men and

disadvantage women but they do also create

serious issues for some men. When we seek to

organise society such that equality is achieved

for women, these issues for men will also be

addressed as part of that restructuring. That

is why gender equality will beneﬁt women and

men and that is why approaches that polarise

debate should be avoided.

Your reliance on the dictionary deﬁnition

of equality is strange, limiting and even disin-

genuous when there are such rich and evolving

philosophical and academic sources of refer-

ence on this theme.

Any examination of equality in our society

has to go beyond individual behaviours, experi-

ences and attitudes if it is to assist in eliminating

inequality. We need to examine the structures

and the systems of a society - how we organise our

society. The structures and systems in our soci-

ety are currently organised to privilege men and

disadvantage women. I have already set out the

evidence for this in the distribution of resources,

inﬂuence, status and caring in our society between

women and men. That is why the search for gen-

der equality is concerned with securing equality

for wome as a group. That is why your assertion

that this gender equality is about blaming or pun-

ishing individual men makes no sense. Gender

equality is about re-organising society for a more

equal distribution of resources, inﬂuence, status

and caring. It is about changing structures and

systems. It is about creating a better society for

women and men.

You resort to personal abuse in advancing

your position. This might serve to intimidate

but not to convince. Therefore, I choose not to

respond to that but you can take it that I do not

accept the accusations that you make.

Niall

From: John Waters

To: Niall Crowley

Subject: Village

Dear Niall,

Have no fear: I do not feel in the least de-

monised. I was merely seeking to call your

tactic and make it visible. I have for years en-

countered this approach employed by people

whose arguments are otherwise threadbare.

But it tickles me that, having started oﬀ by

playing the man rather than the ball, you then

accuse me of engaging in personal abuse, a

classic and instantly veriﬁable instance of

what a shrink would call “projection”.

But nowhere, in any of what you wrote,

or indeed in any of your statements – never

mind actions – while CEO of the Equality Au-

thority, did you intimate that you believed

men and women should be treated equally.

Except, that is, if we accept your deﬁnition of

equality, which goes something like: women

should be treated at least as well as men, but

men have no entitlement to be treated, in any

context, as well as women. Orwell could hard-

ly have put it better.

In fact, you put it even better yourself in

the following quote from a speech you made

while heading up the EA: “The primary objec-

tive for work on men in gender equality must

be to strengthen the role and contribution of

men in challenging and changing the struc-

tures, institutional policies and practices, and

“Women were over twice as likely as men to

experience severe physical abuse, nearly

three times as likely to experience severe

emotional abuse and seven times more

likely to have experienced severe sexual

abuse”

 — village gender special December 2009 - January 2010

culture (including stereotypical attitudes),

that generate and sustain the inequalities ex-

perience by women”. We really do not need to

go beyond these words to see what the prob-

lem is, although this correspondence is lead-

ing me to think that the real problem is that

you don’t see what the problem is.

I’m intrigued that you have brought up the

2005 ESRI/National Crime Council survey. At

the time of its publication I raised some ques-

tions about its methodology, which I felt left it

open to legitimate allegations of institutional

bias, but let us leave this controversy aside

and focus on the broad picture outlined in

that report. Let us put in context, too, that

it arrived into a climate in which there was a

widespread denial that female-on-male vio-

lence existed at all. a culture that, for obvious

reasons, makes it diﬃcult for some men to

report, or even admit to, being assaulted by a

woman.

With this survey, we “discovered” – al-

most literally overnight – that nearly a third

of domestic violence was perpetrated by

women against men. Our sense of the scale of

this problem went from zero to 30 per cent in

one fell swoop. Yet, the funding for services

for male victims and their children, allocated

by the Department of Justice, Equality and

Law Reform (under whose auspices the Equal-

ity Authority operates), has since reached the

princely level of 2.5 per cent. This, of course,

is just one of several streams of funding for

domestic violence, but I have chosen this one

because it has by far the highest proportion of

funding allocated to male victims, amounting

to a female/male ratio of 40:1.

I know that, following the publication of

the ESRI/National Crime Council survey, rep-

resentations were made to you as CEO of the

EA by at least one men’s group, citing precise-

ly this imbalance and seeking your support in

addressing it. What did you do? Nothing. The

unequal funding paradigm remains in place.

There is not one single bed in this coun-

try for a man and his children ﬂeeing a violent

woman. Not one. Recent litigation in Wales

and the US has successfully exposed this im-

balance in those jurisdictions and we are like-

ly to see similar cases here before long. The

legacy of your stewardship of the Equality

Authority, therefore, will almost certainly in-

clude the shaming of Ireland in the European

courts. And your responses in this present

exchange tell us exactly why.

There is no longer room for the possibil-

ity that this gross instance of inequality was

allowed to persist because you did not have

the full facts, or because nobody asked you

to intervene. We know that this happened

because of your ideological position, which,

under your leadership of the EA, excluded

men suﬀering discrimination as men from

any beneﬁt of what was laughably the State’s

instrument for promoting equality and fair-

ness in Irish life.

You say that men “should and do” have

access to the Equality Authority and that any

discrimination “should be eliminated”. Very

well; what did you do, as CEO of the EA, when

approached by a man seeking your support

in exposing the grossly inequitable admin-

istration of Child Beneﬁt, a payment all but

invariably made to women, sometimes re-

gardless of biological relationship to the child

from whom the entitlement derives, and paid

only to fathers when there is no woman to

be found? It’s a rhetorical question. You did

nothing. I have seen the correspondence.

You disingenuously suggest that your zeal

to help men was hidebound by the law. Had

you indicated any willingness to overturn the

legal impediments you speak of, I would have

more than willing to respond to your crusade.

But the model suited you and you never made

the slightest attempt to change it.

In fact, the taking of strategic test cases

are just one element of an armoury which

includes public advocacy and campaigning,

and in which the most powerful function is the

opportunity to advise the Minister for Justice

Equality and Law Reform in pursuit of legis-

lative change. What advices did you oﬀer your

minister in respect of discrimination against

men? That you never sought to represent men’s

interests is obvious from your own descriptions

of your objectives and perspectives, but we can

gather this in other ways also: from the inde-

pendent testimony of men who sought your

support and were either politely rebuﬀed or

coldly ignored, and from the fact that, since

your departure, the Equality Authority has been

able to install as a central item of strategic pol-

icy the objective of dismantling legal and soci-

etal discriminations against single fathers.

You say that “when we seek to organise soci-

ety such that equality is achieved for women,

these issues for men will also be addressed

as part of that restructuring”, but you do not

explain how this will enable fatherhood to be

respected or why it is that the alleged failure

to deliver full equality for women (a debate we

might have another time) necessitates contin-

uing denials of the most fundamental rights of

fathers and children. Among the implications

of your position is that extending just treatment

to father-child relationships involves taking

something from mothers. Perhaps it does, but

it does not involve taking anything from moth-

ers that is rightfully theirs. The withholding

of equal parenting rights to fathers results in

mothers being awarded, by either default or

conscious deed, powers to destroy the rela-

tionships between children and fathers. And

this goes to the core of your error. What you

seek for women is not equality, but preference

and priority in any matter on which a woman

seeks to stake a claim, regardless of right and

wrong. Implicit in your position is the idea

that any claim by a woman must be yielded

to, as a form of compensation for any of the

alleged residual shortfalls in the female equal-

ity agenda in other areas. You are saying that

grievous wrongs against fathers and children

must continue while a single women anywhere

feels dissatisﬁed for any reason. This is a pre-

posterous and amoral position.

The fact that you think I am engaging

in hyperbole in referring to “the sprawling

legions of wounded men who ﬁnd themselves

“There is not one

single bed in this

country for a man

and his children

fleeing a violent

woman”

 Equality debate





“At bottom, I

believe that

structures and

systems which

privilege men

and disadvantage

women, or which

privilege women

and disadvantage

men, need to be

addressed”

in sometimes fatal trouble in our society” indi-

cates the extent of our communications diﬃ-

culty. Every week, I get roughly half a dozen

letters, phone calls or emails from desperate

men who have no one else to turn to. That’s

more than , men since I started writing

on these subjects, and I should note that, since

most of the men aﬀected by these discrimina-

tions would be unlikely to read the Irish Times,

this is but a tiny proportion of the total. These

men have been brutalised by family courts,

robbed by swashbuckling judges playing Sir

Galahad, thrown out of their homes without

a scintilla of substantiated evidence of any

wrongdoing – very often in situations where

they and their children are being terrorised

by someone enjoying the felt omnipotence

instilled by our corrupted family law culture

– and sometimes driven to the brink of suicide.

(Perhaps I need to remind you of the suicide

ratio in this State for several decades?)

It is not my job to help these men, although

I am glad to do what I can. But it was, for a

while, part of your job to help them, and you

did not do so. Perhaps – I concede – they did

not approach you for help. But I wonder why.

Maybe they had read your annual reports.

As for your relying for retrospective pro-

tection on the Equal Status Acts which you

say “exempt any action that is required un-

der a court order” – I’m afraid that, like little

boys and biro stains, it won’t wash. There was

nothing to stop you taking an advocatory posi-

tion on the treatment of men by family courts,

in the same way as the EA has championed a

range of causes from gay rights to travellers’

rights, quite separately from pursuing test

cases. If the will existed, the way would have

been found. I am happy to see that, since your

departure, the EA has made opposition to dis-

crimination against single fathers a matter of

policy.

And, ah yes, Dr Coulter. I and others tore

Dr Coulter’s report to shreds until nothing of

it remained to sense or reason, and she ig-

nored any such interventions and proceeded

as per her orders. Her conclusion that men

did not suﬀer discrimination was based on

two Orwellian distortions. She said that most

family law orders were made by “consent”,

without saying what consent means. For a

man facing a family law hearing, “consent”

means grabbling at any straw of a concession

oﬀered on the steps of the court, in the cer-

tain knowledge that he will be defenestrated

if he goes inside.

Dr Coulter also introduced us to a new

meaning of the word “custody”. Informing

us that most disputes now result in “joint cus-

tody”, she omitted the small print: “with daily

care and control to the mother”. To be told

that you have “joint custody” of your child but

cannot see her is a little – only a very little –

like being told that you own your clothes but

may not wear them.

Then, to your general philosophical/ideo-

logical position. In principle there is noth-

ing wrong with it. The problem resides with

your failure to track, without fear or favour,

all actually existing structural discrimination

in Irish life. Even many diehard feminists

would now regard as laughable your charac-

terization of the structures and systems in

our society as currently organised “to privi-

lege men and disadvantage women”. But this

reveals the precise nature of your ideological

myopia. You accepted a particular version of

Irish society and did not seek to update your

model. I look at ALL structures and systems,

whereas you are selective about which ones

you see. At bottom, I believe that structures

and systems which privilege men and disad-

vantage women, or which privilege women

and disadvantage men, need to be addressed.

That is the key point of diﬀerence between

us and it infuses my transparent agenda.

Your contributions to this debate are ac-

tually more supportive of my argument than

anything I have written myself. You openly

acknowledge that, rather than challenge

discrimination and inequality wherever you

might have found it, you conducted an ideo-

logical war on certain selected elements of

Irish societal infrastructure, while ignoring

inequality that did not suit this programme.

This is exactly what I say you did.

I happen to believe that society is the

sum of its individual experiences, and that

inequality does not always follow ideologi-

cal patterns. Sometimes new patterns as-

sert themselves and the ideologues struggle

to keep up. Sometimes the ideologues turn

blind eyes. You seem to be suggesting that

you had no responsibility, as head of the

“Equality” Authority, to defend a man who

was suﬀering discrimination – as a man

– at the hands of another man, or indeed a

woman, because this, ipso facto, cannot be

deﬁned as “structural” disadvantage. Is that

really your position?

While it is certainly the case that much of

the discrimination suﬀered by men because

they are men is experienced at the most inti-

mate, personal level, in the deepest state of

loneliness and at the hands of a secretive and

protected system, it is also the case that the

source of this discrimination is structural. It

is systemic, systematic and a matter of poli-

cy. No man can tackle it alone. It was your

job to tackle it and you refused to do so.

But your position that equality must be

seen in the collective context rather than in

the lives of individuals is puzzling also since

so much of the Equality Authority’s cam-

paigning was conducted through test cases,

which usually involved individuals who had

acquired standing on a particular issue in-

volving discrimination. You were happy to

represent individuals when their grievances

ﬁtted your ideological programme, but not

otherwise.

Your claim to have addressed yourself

to changing structures and systems so as to

create “a better society for women and men”

would be laudable had you actually done it.

But you did not. You addressed only those

structures and systems that corresponded

 — village gender special December 2009 - January 2010

to your ideological prejudices. The rest you

ignored, which means that many, many men,

and many of these men’s children, are inﬁ-

nitely unhappier now than they might have

been. Like a piano tuner who tuned only the

white keys and refused to touch or listen to

the black notes, you left the instrument as

out of tune as it ever was, only in a diﬀerent

way.

This is especially lamentable because you

were the ﬁrst CEO of the Equality Author-

ity, and therefore in a position to deﬁne its

terms and lay down principles and struc-

tures capable of generating a true concept

of equality. Your job was to target harmful

discrimination, not to conduct a war against

one half of the population, allegedly – I say

allegedly – on behalf of the other half.

You failed to do your job as it should have

been done. I am clearer now than I was at

the beginning of this exchange as to why this

happened – and inﬁnitely more dismayed.

Thank you for the debate. I enjoyed it.

Yours truly,

John Waters

From: Niall Crowley

To: John Waters

Subject: Village

Dear John

You persist in trying to turn this exchange

into some form of evaluation of my role in

the Equality Authority. I suppose I could do

likewise in relation to your role as a journalist.

This seems however to trivialise a necessary

debate on gender equality. Unless of course

you have some other agenda at play.

You are fully aware of the purpose, func-

tion and boundaries of the Equality Authority

and yet you choose to ignore this. I have told

you personally on occasion and you seem to

have access to correspondence I have been

involved in with other people. However, for

clarity, let me reiterate:-

. The Equality Authority has a broad remit

to promote equality and to combat discrimina-

tion. However it has this remit in a constrained

ﬁeld - in the areas covered by the Employment

Equality Acts and the Equal Status Acts. This

mandate governed both promotional or advo-

cacy work as you refer to it as well as casework.

You know that some of the matters you raise fall

outside this remit - in fact some are even dealt

with by other state agencies.

. Actions taken on foot of court orders and

actions taken on foot of other pieces of legis-

lation are exempted from the equality legisla-

tion. The Equality Authority has raised this as

an issue in the past to no avail. You have never

raised this issue. You know that other matters

you raise fall into this exemption.

. The legislation is based on an individual

enforcement model. It is individuals who can

allege discrimination under the Acts and take a

case not whole groups such as men. You know

that you are demanding casework where this

model is an insurmountable barrier.The statu-

tory mandate given to the Equality Authority

sets the boundaries not only for strategic test

cases it might take but for all work carried

out by the Equality Authority. The Equality

Authority did, on a number of occasions, make

proposals to remove relevant exemptions in the

equality legislation. John Waters at no point

supported such initiatives.

Yet you persist in raising and reiterating

these matters and seeking action where action

is not possible. This seems to me to be the real

and only ideological myopia in this exchange.

You set out your belief that society is the

sum of its individual experiences. I think that

this is a limited and limiting understanding of

society. It seems to be the core disagreement in

this exchange. I believe that society has to also

be understood as encompassing wider struc-

tures and systems that govern and shape the

space for these individual experiences. Social

problems are not just a creation of individual

experiences. Social problems are deeply rooted

in how society is organised - structures and sys-

tems. The roots of social problems lie in these

structures and systems - that is why structures

and systems which privilege men and disadvan-

tage women need to be addressed. That will

beneﬁt both men and women because these

structures and systems create negative indi-

vidual experiences for women and for men. It

is in the immediate interests of both men and

women therefore to change these strutures and

systems.

Your dismissal of Dr Carol Coulter is tell-

ing. You are put out by respected, evidence-

based, innovative and high-quality research

that calls into question one of the basic ten-

ets that you have based your campaigning on.

The family law courts emerge in this research

untainted by any systematic bias against men.

You responded by seeking, in your own words,

to tear it to shreds. Your myths had to be sus-

tained: ideology, it appears, had to triumph

over objective reality.

And still you persist in mis-quoting me. I

did not, as you suggest, say that the Equality

Authority has no responsibility to defend a man

who experiences discrimination as a man. It

clearly does have this responsibility and it

has fulﬁlled this responsibility. You choose

to ignore that fact - another fact that fails to

uphold your myths.

Moreover, it is hardly accurate to say that

the Equality Authority has now made it a ‘cen-

tral item of strategic policy’ to seek to dismantle

‘legal and societal discrimination against single

fathers’. The current strategic plan includes a

reference to the ‘equal sharing of caring rights

and responsibilities between women and men’.

This is one sentence in a thirty one page plan.

One year of the plan has now passed and there

is no evidence of new initiative in this area. It

would appear that, unsurprisingly, the statu-

tory mandate still holds.

Thank you too John for engaging with me

in this debate.

Niall

“Your myths had

to be sustained:

ideology, it

appears, had to

triumph over

objective reality”

 Equality debate