There is a better way

This is an update to one of the earliest posts I ever wrote on this blog, back in 2006, some 500 or more rants ago.

If you recall, Molly/Misbah was a little girl who ran away from a council estate in Scotland where she lived with her mother to be with her father in Lahore, Pakistan, sparking an Interpol search.

It subsequently transpired that the child wanted to live with her father and other siblings there, and was very unhappy at the prospect of being with her mother in poverty and deprivation in Scotland.

There was, at the time, concerns about the mother's drinking too.

In the end, Molly got to live in Pakistan with dad, but one wonders whether that would have been the case had the evidence not stacked up so strongly that it was the best place for her. Had she not expressed her own desire so dramatically to leave, had her mother not been drinking, had her father not been affluent enough to fight the case, it could have been very different.

Anyhow, the update is that she has now, as a near-adult, moved back to Scotland to be with her mother and one of her sisters. Reading between the lines (Mum's had a child by another relationship taken from her custody) the girls are looking after their mother rather than the other way around.

But what's crucially important about this development is that it came about as the result of out-of-court negotiations between all the parties. IE the dad Sajad Rana could have sat in Pakistan and ignored all the mother's claims, but he didn't. He facilitated her visits and permitted his children to return to be with her when they expressed that interest.

There is a better way to resolve custody disputes than the traumatic and dramatic adversarial court system that put this family through the ringer over 3 years ago. And these people have found that way. It is to talk, mediate, negotiate and put the children first at all times.

I congratulate Sajad Rana for showing grace by allowing his children to be with their mother, and I congratulate Louise Campbell for having grown into a responsible relationship with her children and her co-parent.

And I'm delighted for little Molly/Misbah, who I suspect will never again feel the desperate need to run away sparking an international manhunt because she was so unhappy about the situation created by her parents' break-up.

Many couples can learn from the example here. The lessons are myriad - mothers who vindictively use their children against their exes may find those children come to reject them. Parents who show dignity and respect their children's need to see their other parents are rewarded with love and loyalty. And no one need enrich the parasites of the legal profession in resolving the issues that arise when a relationship breaks up.

There is a better way. Perhaps it's time we all migrated to it.

One in the eye for Big Brother

Never mind the TV show.

There is not, never has been and never will be anything relevant or important about sitting on your couch talking bollocks with your mates about the strangers sitting on a different couch, also talking bollocks, that you can see on your telly.

Never was the idiot box a more appropriate phrase than in relation to that nonsense.

But of course, like all entertainments permitted to us poor plebs, it serves as a distraction from the fact that in Britain more than anywhere else worldwide, the government really is watching you.

That's the real Big Brother in action. But thankfully it has for once been stymied in its tracks by the most unlikely of opposition - the European Court of Human Rights.

So immunised to the constant sight of human rights abuses are we today that the plight of people in horror states like Tibet or Zimbabwe just seems to become almost the way things seem destined to be in some parts of the world.

The abuse of people's individual basic rights is so widespread, so ubiquitous that we end up desensitised even to the erosion of our own rights as they disappear before our eyes.

Even with the images of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib before their eyes, American citizens still allowed both 'Patriot' Acts to be enacted with barely a word of protest.

And in the UK, the New Labour regime has presided over a wholesale eradication of basic human rights, with its most extensive public surveillance system in the world monitoring citizens whose DNA it takes without permission and stores forever without justification.

So the news today that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled this practice to be illegal should be celebrated by ALL EU citizens, whether British or not, whether resident in Britain or not.

It's not and never has been an issue of 'those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear.'

We've all lost count by now of how many times public records and sensitive information like bank, medical, military or political affiliation records have been lost, stolen or leaked into the public domain or sold to criminals.

There is a simple principle at stake here. The state apparatus has no right to take and store the DNA of its citizens, especially of those never convicted of a criminal offence. And if the European court rules that it is illegal in England, then it is illegal throughout the EU.

That's one in the eye for Big Brother.

The reality of deadbeat dads

Last week, Minister for (in)Justice Dermot Ahern answered a parliamentary question in the Oireachtas about the inequality suffered by Irish fathers.

His answer was that existing legislation was perfectly acceptable in ensuring the relationship of children with their fathers following parental separation and divorce.

This is utter bollocks as everyone in the country knows. Unmarried fathers have to actually apply to be considered parents of their own children.

Fathers who separate from their children's mothers, no matter what the reason (short of maternal drug abuse or imprisonment) can expect to lose their homes and children in the family law courts.

All this inequality is based on two pillars of untruth - the outmoded prejudice that Mommy knows best, and the myth of the deadbeat dad.

That's why I must pay tribute to today's Daily Mail, whose reactionary politics would normally preclude it from depicting campaigning fathers as anything other than Spidey-suit clad loons.

Their article by writer William Leith is a superlative testimony to the reality of separated fathers' lives.

It should be obligatory reading for the single-mom agitators, who would rather see taxes spent on third party childminding rather than see legislation implemented to ensure children receive proper upbringing by both their parents equitably.

It should also be read by ignorant, complacent men in power like Dermot Ahern, who is only a marital separation away from doing the McDonalds weekend parenting shift himself.

Dads have fewer rights than lesbian lovers

Irish fathers be warned.

According to a court ruling yesterday, the one third of you who are not married to the mothers of your children have fewer rights than a lesbian in a relationship with your child's mother.

In a preposterous ruling that has massive implications for 30% of Irish fathers, Mr 'Justice' John Hedigan ruled yesterday that a family of two women and a child was no less of a family than an unmarried man and woman with a child.

And then he ruled against permitting the father of a child guardianship of his own flesh and blood, because of the poisonous relationship between the father and the two lesbians.

Let's just tease this one out, because the implications are rather profound.

In Ireland, if you are not married, and you father a child, you have no de facto rights. You are obliged to seek those rights of guardianship, access and custody via the family law courts, which are held in camera, meaning that what is said in those courtrooms cannot be repeated, either in libel cases or in other formats like the media.

In other words, you could go to court to gain access to your child, only to be called for example a paedophile or a drug addict with no basis in reality, and be denied a relationship with your child.

And now, thanks to the most recent ruling yesterday, you can be denied a relationship with your child because the mother has shacked up with another woman and they don't want you involved!

This story will inevitably be spun as some sort of victory for equal rights for gay couples. It isn't. It's a defeat for fathers.

It's the story of a father denied a relationship with his son, a child he fathered, made up of half of his genes, because of the caprice of a lesbian couple and the blind stupidity of the Irish family law system, which favours everything and everyone over father's rights.

And it's the story of a little boy denied a relationship with his male parent because his mother is vindictive and because courts are shit-scared of doing anything that could remotely be spun as homophobic.

Conclusion: It's alright to deny human rights to people as long as they are children or fathers in Ireland.

Wanted: New Stalker for Top Irish Model

So Glenda Gilson's stalking nightmare is over.

Following her 'court ordeal', in which the alleged stalker received a suspended sentence, 'top Irish model' Glenda expressed her relief to any tabloid entertainments correspondent who happened to be on hand.

Hence her preposterously eyebrowed gob on the front page of the papers today, not to mention on TV all day yesterday.

This leads me to a number of thoughts:

1. How much of a loser do you have to be to stalk Glenda Gilson? I mean, Jessica Alba I can see the attraction. Scarlett Johansson, fair enough. Angelina Jolie? Well, she'd probably be more likely to stalk you. But Glenda sodding Gilson?

2. How bereft of news are the papers when Glenda's stalker hell makes front page? Seriously, there isn't a person in the country doesn't see through this painful puff for what it is - which is another sorry and desperate attempt to promote GG as the future of television presenting in England.

3. Do we really not have better looking women in this country? Maybe I need my eyes checked, but it seems to me that you could trip over better looking girls than 'top model' Glenda, just by walking up Grafton Street at 3am.

4. What sort of a name is Glenda anyway? What were her parents thinking? I mean, is she supposed to be the Good Witch of the North or something?

5. Now that her stalker has been rightly chastened with a suspended sentence, what will Glenda do to keep generating the press interest? No one watches that obscure cable MTV rip-off she presents, and most people just groan and turn the page when they see her eyebrows selling some snake-oil tit cream or similarly ridiculous product. Perhaps she'll be looking for a new stalker to keep those headlines rolling in.