An imbalance of justice

For years women in this country were discriminated against by the State. The marriage bar and the laws against contraception put Ireland way behind in recognising the rights of women.

The women’s rights lobby can claim success for many of these victories, but there seems to be less of an outcry when men are seen to be treated harsher by the law.
In a country all too familiar with horror stories of child abuse, Ireland watched in disbelief as details of the Roscommon incest case were unearthed. What was also shocking was the revelation that the seven year sentence handed down to the mother in the case could have been life, had it been a man committing the same offence.

In her judgement, Judge Miriam Reynolds explained the details of what had happened to the six children over the course of 7 years. They were neglected to the point that they were fed twice a week in a rat and mouse infested house and were sent to school with “lice crawling down their faces”.

The woman also forced her second eldest son to have sex with her when he was 13 years of age. Judge Reynolds said that the children “were failed by everyone around them”. Why then, did the judge fail the children even further by imposing the paltry seven-year sentence on the woman who destroyed their childhood.

It is true that the 1908 act that governs incest only allows for a seven year sentence for women. This woman, however, was convicted of 11 separate charges, with a combined total of over 50 years in prison. There was therefore no reason why the sentences couldn’t have run consecutively and have given this woman the jail term she deserved. If Judge Reynolds needed any guidance she could have looked at the Criminal Justice Sexual Offences Act 2006.

It says that engaging in a sexual act with a child under 15 carries a maximum of life imprisonment. Although the act was passed too late to be implemented in this case, it surely shows the prevailing attitude as to how child abusers should be dealt with. There is no way a woman should receive seven years for an offence that a man would spend life in prison for.

Regardless of the sentence, it emerged recently that the mother is now sharing a cell with Scissor Sister Charlotte Mulhall in the Dochas Centre in Mountjoy.

I say cell, but as many students commented on a recent trip I attended to the prison, it is more akin to the Larkfield apartments on DCU campus.

In the women’s prison, each prisoner has their own room adjoined to another prisoner’s by way of a shared door. They have the keys to their own room and can roam the grounds at specific times.

The pictures published of Charlotte Mulhall playfully holding a lethal kitchen knife to the neck of a male friend in the prison, demonstrated the lax atmosphere in the Dochas Centre.

During my visit, the sight of Linda Mulhall with a shovel, doing a spot of prison gardening also brought an ironic smile to my face (the severed head of her victim was taken on the bus to Tallaght where it was buried and has never been found).

When you then travel over to the Victorian men’s prison 50 metres away, the contrast is shocking. The overcrowding that has meant releasing 50 prisoners from the Dochas centre is far more of a problem here, but is dealt with by putting three men in a cell designed for one.

These rooms have no toilet facilities and inmates must use chamber pots which they can only empty once a day. Two of these men must sleep on the floor right beside where the other may be filling up his chamber pot. Needless to say they do not have the keys to their rooms.

It should not be accepted that men are treated like animals while women like the Mulhalls live in relative luxury just metres away.

These issues highlight several instances of discrimination on behalf of the legal system. There are, however, others.

The status of unmarried fathers for example, is one which the government needs to address. At the moment an unmarried father has no rights to guardianship, custody or access to his child. These rights must be conferred by a court. The mother of course, has all of the above rights automatically when the child is born.

This again is an example of the casual inequality that is shown against men in the legal system. This kind of discrimination would not be tolerated if women were on the receiving end, nor should it be.

So, if people who talk about equality really mean what they say and do not just mean it as a code word for women’s rights, perhaps these are the issues they should be focussing on.