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— village gender special December 2009 - January 2010
Driven by rights – John Waters and Niall Crowley
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
