Terry Prone: Tough love includes intervening when a child is destroying their life

Decent people come up with answers quickly. They’d take the baby because they’re fond of the baby and babies aren’t great at self-rescue. They’d grab the budgie’s cage.

They might even tuck the goldfish bowl under their arm because they don’t want them boiled. 

They might take a favourite painting, book, or pair of shoes. Some opt to remove a photograph with sentimental significance.

All of which proves the respondents are sweet, empathetic, responsible, caring folk who lack common sense. Because the single thing you should take out of a burning home is the fire itself. 

Remove the flames and the goldfish bowl doesn’t warm up even a small bit. 

The budgie’s still a Pretty Polly and the baby’s undisturbed. But nobody ever thinks of removing the fire, and having failed to apply common sense, albeit of the hypothetical kind, to the issue, everybody then makes excuses, because to be exposed as lacking common sense is pretty devastating.

An outstanding recent example of common sense in action is the case of the mother who saw the signs of drug use and drug involvement in her 19-year-old son.

This particular mother, looking at a situation so many mothers of teenagers encounter, accommodated her own limited agency in the issue, and called the cops. She informed on her son, in other words, to An Garda Síochána.

Not easy, that action.

This country, in song and story, has long excoriated the informer.

Nationally, we have a memory of hating those who sold comrades to the occupying powers, even if the informer was under duress at the time.

That thread of national conviction intertwines with the one which holds that families fight with each other, but let an outsider get involved and watch the instant familial solidarity in the face of external intervention.

The bottom line of these linked philosophies is that shopping a member of the family to the gardaí is unforgivable. The guards themselves are used to this pattern of behaviour.

They are resigned to attending domestic incidents where one family member has done vicious damage to another, Punch and Judy-style, which damage is recorded in the narrative drawn from the one (usually Judy) who’s spitting broken teeth and holding frozen peas to her swelling eye, only for the whole thing to be subsequently denied, as the sad conspiracy of “family loyalty” kicks in.

This mother probably understood that she was risking their relationship, but she had bigger fish to fry.

The way she saw it — according to the barrister who defended the son — was that her son’s life was so out of control, she didn’t know whether he would survive this time, or end up dead.

To prevent the worst outcome, she invited the forces of the law/guardians of the peace into the house and pointed them to her son’s room.

Their investigations revealed a rucksack in the bedroom containing €25,000 worth of cannabis. We’re not suggesting the young man had come up with the €25k. But someone among his acquaintances had.

Someone of whom he was sufficiently and rightly terrified that — a day later when he began to co-operate with the guardians of the peace — he baulked at naming names.

He ended up in court and sentencing was postponed to give time to assess if he could get his act together and rehabilitate himself.

He did. He wound up with a completely suspended sentence and a suggestion from the judge that he should be grateful to his mother for the rest of his life because she’d jolted him off a bad path.

Nearly four years after the episode, he’s in college and seems to have ironed out his life.

Understanding of crime intervention

We don’t know how he feels about his mother’s intervention, but it’s clear this woman knew what the guards are for. She understood crime prevention. She probably understood her son better than he did, at the time, and made a sensible, productive intervention.

Many parents would not have made that intervention. Many parents, faced with the evidence of drug-taking on the part of one of their children, reproach and threaten. Others beg and warn.

One way or the other, action is postponed, and with every passing day, the user is more endangered, although where the worst threat is going to come from is never easy to know.

Witness the situation in Dublin, where close to 50 overdoses have happened because of users buying heroin, which at first seemed to be especially dangerous because of unusual purity/strength.

As the overdoses continued, the HSE issued a statement pointing to a complicating factor, a synthetic opioid named nitazine, which had been identified by Forensic Science Ireland as present in what’s being sold as pure heroin.

The warnings about this contaminated heroin may not reach or influence addicts desperate for a fix to stave off the agonies of withdrawal.

Drug-taking has an insidious progression, where intervention may pay off or may lethally backfire.

In the case of the woman whose son was effectively told to appreciate her for her intervention, the outcome was wonderful. The payoff for her common sense approach to her son’s activities was positive, as far as outsiders can tell.

What a shame neither of Molly Martens’ parents seems to have had that common sense appreciation of their daughter’s problems.

Martens, as the second judicial process and the victim impact statements consequent upon it establishes without doubt, was mentally ill from the time she was 14. 

Whether as a part of that illness or as part of her character, she was a serial liar. She lied constantly and sometimes without purpose. She did dreadful things to the children subject to her obsessive determination to possess them.

Dreadful things like introducing an eight-year-old to the concept and methodology of vomiting up ingested calories. She violently assaulted the slightly older boy and — as has been clear for some time — she killed their father with malice, aforethought, and determined planning, even if the verdict, courtesy of America’s plea deal system, was one of manslaughter.

Mental illness may explain some of Molly Martens’ behaviour. Nothing explains the behaviour of her parents.

They bought into her demented, deceitful portrayal of her marriage. Instead of the commonsense intervention they must have known she needed, based on past medical experience, they colluded with a crazy conspiracy.

Instead of taking the fire out of the burning house, they fuelled it.