Sympathy for the daddy devil at last?

Obviously, men are evil and wrong. We already knew that.

Even when women murder their own children in cold blood, it's not their fault but that of some man, somewhere, who drove them to it by callously leaving them, or having the audacity to sleep with someone who isn't a crazy child-killer.

Yup, somehow, it's always a man's fault.

We've seen this in some of the commentary about this sad case, where an upper middle-class affluent mum lost the plot and killed her two toddlers.

Not one article has failed to mention that her husband left her insane ass before Christmas, as if that was the causative reason for the death of these two poor kids, and not their crazy knife-wielding mother.

And plenty of online comment has sought to exonerate her entirely in the context of the allegedly clear and obvious distress she was under due to the break up.

Well, what about the distress of the father? He's had to answer a knock at the door from the plod and hear that his children have been killed by their mad ma. He'll be struggling to contain his grief right now, wondering why he didn't take them with him when he split from their mother.

Maybe in future, the next time a crazy bitch decides that her children must die in order to hurt her ex-partner, the media and the public will lay blame where it actually belongs.

When Arthur McElhill burnt his family to death, no one would have dared suggested or implied that somehow his utterly innocent partner, who tragically died along with her children, had any responsibility for his despicable act of murder.

So why the eagerness to transfer some of Fiona Dennison's blame onto her former partner? Does anyone seriously believe, as he mourns his two children, that he isn't suffering enough right now?

This is how the patriarchy myth unfolds in such circumstances. Since, obviously, our society is cruelly dominated by the evil patriarchy, it stands to reason that it is the patriarchy and not the woman with the knife in her hands and the bodies of her children in the boot of her car who is to blame.

For some people, not to mention the legal system, mummy's always right, even when she's a latent killer.There is no court in Ireland or Britain prepared to grant sole custody to a father unless the mother is already in jail or a chronic substance abuser.

One hopes that one day people will see through these double standards. Hopefully one day we will mature to the point of Scandinavian nations, who rightly see parenting as a joint task performed by two people - mother and father.

In the meantime, there is a single glimmer of hope for devil daddies. Britain's bringing in a right to six month's paternity leave for new dads. It's not much. In fact, it's pathetic in the context of what children and fathers ACTUALLY need in terms of new legislation.

But it's a start.