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Government At War With Parents:
Evelyn
by Taunya Lovell Banks
Bruce Beresford's latest film,
Evelyn, is a feel-good Irish version of the 1997 PBS documentary
The Orphan Trains (directed by Janet Graham and Edward
Gray). The Orphan Trains documents the removal of more
than 100,000 impoverished children from the streets of New York
City between 1854 and 1929 to homes in rural America. Large numbers
of impoverished children from other urban areas like Boston,
Chicago and Philadelphia also were sent to the country in a misguided
effort to "rescue" them. Some children were adopted
by farm families, but many worked as farm laborers. Ireland adopted
a similar policy in the 1940s and 1950s.
 Evelyn reminds us that misguided government
policies separating families are not unique to the United States.
In 1953 Evelyn Doyle's mother runs off leaving her husband to
care for their three children. Evelyn's doting father, Desmond
Doyle (played by Pierce Brosnan), is unemployed and overly fond
of the drink, so the state intercedes for the alleged welfare
of the children. The children are placed in institutions run
by the Catholic Church, and the stage is set for the battle to
regain custody. Doyle decides to take on both the government
and the Catholic Church. Evelyn is about Desmond's attempt
to regain custody of his children.
In the first of several courtroom
scenes, the Magistrate tells Desmond that he is losing his children
because he has no job or mother for his children. When the Catholic
nuns come in to clean the children and the house, one wonders
whether Desmond's real offense is not having a wife rather than
being impoverished. The clear implication is that in Ireland
during the 1950s, fathers could not have sole custody of their
children without the consent of the mothers. Many of the legal
questions about the case, however, are not fully developed--in
part because the story is told from the point-of-view of eight-year-old
Evelyn.
The film addresses several
legal obstacles. The first is the black letter of the Children's
Act of 1941. The Act said that a child could only be removed
from the church-run institutions with the consent of their "parents."
The Irish Court interprets the law as requiring the consent of
both living parents. Since Evelyn's mother's whereabouts are
unknown, it is impossible under the law for Doyle to regain custody
of his children. In theory, at least, had Desmond run off instead
of Evelyn's mother, the children still would have been removed.
Whether this actually happened is unclear. Many viewers may assume
that mothers retained custody of their children after being abandoned
by their husbands, or that children were never taken when both
parents were present in the home. The reality not evident in
Evelyn is much grimmer.
A second significant legal
issue that is not adequately explained to American audiences
is the reluctance of the Irish Supreme Court to overturn a statute
enacted by the legislature. The notion of judicial review is
so widely accepted in this country, it might be hard for American
viewers to appreciate the institutional significance of the Doyle
case. Although the 1937 Constitution gives the Irish Supreme
Court the power to judicially review statutes, the Court had
not exercised the power to invalidate a statute until the Doyle
case.
Evelyn is based on an actual 1953 case that became
a cause celebre in Ireland. Church-run schools, called "Magdalens,"
were dreaded places occupied by pregnant unmarried girls and
children deemed troublemakers, juvenile delinquents, orphans,
or destitute. Since Evelyn's experiences in the institution are
relatively benign, the film's focus is on the court battle. What
seems to make this case somewhat unique in the 1950s is that
the father is fighting for custody. Once more the unstated assumption
in the film is that in custody battles during this era fathers
generally lose, at least in countries where the prevailing societal
presumption is that children are better off with mothers rather
than fathers.
Evelyn leaves many important questions unanswered.
We never learn why the legislature enacted the 1941 law, or why
Evelyn's mother decided to leave her children. Evelyn Doyle,
after selling her story to the filmmakers, penned a memoir with
the same name that became a best seller in the United Kingdom.
A version of this memoir, entitled Tea and Green Ribbons,
was released in the United States in December. In the memoir
Evelyn writes that when at age 21 she found and confronted her
runaway mother, the woman gave "her reasons" for leaving.
Evelyn's mother left six, not
three, children, and a drunken unemployed husband. Many men have
left home for less reason, but society tends to frown more when
mothers leave. Thus, the viewing audiences may be tempted to
overlook or downplay Desmond's faults. It helps when Desmond
is played by an attractive film star like Brosnan. The film also
lets the Catholic Church off lightly. Doyle's lawyers allude
to the Church as a powerful opponent, but the force of the Church
is never clearly displayed in the film. We are left wondering
why the government fought so hard for such a seemingly insignificant
case.
One picky criticism about lack of consistency: in the final scene
of Evelyn there is a prominent "placement" of
a Kellogg's Corn Flakes box on top of the refrigerator. First,
it is highly unlikely that an Irish working class household in
the 1950s, still recovering from World War II, would have an
American cereal in the house. Second, even if Desmond's Irish-born,
but American raised, lawyer sent him a box of cereal, the filmmaker's
Kellogg's corn flakes box looks like the contemporary box, not
like a 1950's box.
A better film for raising many
issues present in Evelyn and adding several more is Phillip
Noyce's latest film, Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), a powerful
film about family, culture and cultural conflict, and my personal
favorite for 2002. Australia is attempting to come to grips with
the consequences of a government policy authorizing the removal
of "mixed race" children, children of aboriginals and
whites, from their parents and placement in church-run institutions.
These children, called the Stolen Generation, are at the center
of a raging debate in Australia over whether the removal policy
was simply misguided benevolence or genocide directed at eliminating
the aboriginal community. The film clearly states that the goal
for the removal of mixed race children was to assimilate and
whiten their offspring, minimizing growth within the aboriginal
community -- genocide.
What Rabbit Proof Fence
indicates more clearly than Evelyn is how governments,
and often religious institutions, use law to undercut parental
authority and autonomy, especially in situations where parents
are dependent upon government largess (food, shelter, etc.) One
important difference, however, is that the parents in Rabbit
Proof Fence did not have available to them the same formal
legal remedies to challenge the removal of their children as
Desmond Doyle. Our question should be why not.
Finally, after viewing Evelyn,
Rabbit Proof Fence or The Orphans Trains, we should
ask ourselves whether each country has learned anything about
when and how government should intervene in family life. The
hard question is how to determine when government intervention
is well-meaning and even if well-meaning, misguided.
Posted January 21, 2003
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