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'Contacts to Men's Aid increase by 26% over last year'

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  • 17-11-2023 12:27pm
    #1
    thatshowthelightgetsin
    Registered Users Posts: 55 ✭✭


    https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/1117/1417007-mens-aid-domestic-violence/

    I know for a fact that late last year/earlier this year Helen McEntee, who is elected by Fine Gael voters in East Meath, in her role as Minister for (in)Justice, via Tusla, cut the pittance that is the Men's Aid budget even further so the monthly Men's Aid peer support meetings were changed to every 3-4 months. Oh, and we all have to drive to Navan for them because evidently men are not abused in Cork, Galway, Donegal or anywhere else in Ireland. There are so many layers of sexist discrimination in the whole family law process.

    Meanwhile, Women's Aid and all the other women's lobby groups get millions. At last count, women got 86% of all Irish State funding: https://www.mensvoicesireland.com/news/the-gender-gap-in-state-funding-for-mens-and-womens-groups/

    Not to put the cat among the pigeons here, but any chance that the Comptroller and Auditor General might see how that money is being spent by our current "sacred cows", the women's rights' industry? Or, is the current "greater good" of Irish society served by not challenging anything to do with women's rights? Not so long ago the Roman Catholic Church was our untouchable "greater good". It never works out well for weaker people when any group is given such a sacred cow status. Does Irish society ever learn?


    And despite the egregiously sexist Irish State policy of, via An Garda Síochána and the judiciary, forcing the father, rather than the mother, to move from the family home when both sides makes allegations of abuse, there is not a single shelter for men in the whole Irish State. Not a single one. Re-read that. All across Ireland, fathers who are the victims of violence from women have not a single shelter.

    This is only the tip of the iceberg, because guys refuse to talk. More specifically, the standard practice of levelling false allegations against fathers to remove them from the family home/children's lives is the great silencer: if a completely false, evidence-free allegation is made against the father, "there's no smoke without fire" so men keep quiet. While this is understandable, it also allows the injustice to worsen and go on for years.

    Most spectacularly in this regard is the role of the Irish State: it refuses to fasttrack all allegations about the trustworthiness/ability of a father to parent his children. Accordingly, in reality our family law system is, for fathers, 100% a "guilty until proven innocent" system when it comes to mothers levelling false allegations against fathers. Crucially, that utterly destructive false allegation and all the control it exerts over the father's relationship with his children/home hangs over the father for years. The father is removed - in a spectacularly sexist fashion invariably, but that's another story - from the family home.

    As it takes years for the legal issues/divorce to get to court, the woman successfully creates a "new reality for the children" and judges then rule "Let's leave things as they are - the father has shown he can pay rent for his bedsit and the mortgage along with maintenance, and the mother can stay in the 4-bed family home - until the youngest is 23." There are all sorts of variants on this theme. They rarely if ever, however, result in the children being removed from the mother, the mother sent to prison for destroying the children's attachment to their father/parental alienation (child abuse) and the father given their custody. Instead, even when Tusla, the DPP and AGS combine to say the woman levelled false allegations against a father, removed him from his children's lives for years based upon her false allegations, and cost him tens of thousands of euro in legal fees to prove his innocence - the judges in our kangaroo court family law system make judgments like this one from two months ago, September 2023:

    https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41225728.html

    Being treated like a piece of dirt and dehumanised by the Irish family law system and all its delays, the crushing, for years, of your honour and dignity as a man and as a person, the destruction, for years if not life, of your relationship with your own children, your removal from your home for years under a mere unsubstantiated allegation, your financial and mental health destruction - this does not just happen to other fathers! People need to have immense clarity about this. It could be your son, your dad, your brother, your uncle, your cousin, your best male friend, you. 'First they came for that father, and I said nothing because it was not my father.... then they came for me, and there was nobody left to stand up.'

    Men need to start talking about what's happening! We need to be brave, and highlight the heartbreaking prejudices which the Irish family law judiciary - protected by the "in camera"/secrecy rule of the family law courts - are sanctioning every day of the week. Parental alienation and false allegations are very, very, very real problems - as are the prejudices of the judiciary against fathers having equal parenting time with their own children.



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