I think Michelle would be proud of what I’ve done
When his partner of 20 years died suddenly, John O’Meara fought for the rights of his family in the land’s highest court
IT was a case of mistaken identity. In 2002, John O’Meara was home from working in New York to attend a family funeral in Nenagh, and he went out for the night to the Maximus nightclub in the Co. Tipperary town. Spotting a woman he knew, he wandered over to say hello, but she wasn’t the woman he thought she was.
Instead, it was Michelle Batey, and the meeting changed both their lives. He was 20, she was 23 and, after seeing each other again the following week, they became a couple. They had 20 years together, until Michelle, who was in remission from breast cancer, contracted Covid just before Christmas 2020. In January 2021, she went into a coma, and tragically died.
When John, now the lone parent of three children, sought the widower’s pension, he was told he was not eligible to receive it, because he and Michelle never married. Stung by the inequity of this, he started out on a path that this week led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling that awarded the pension to him.
As we face into a referendum in March that, if successful, will place ‘durable relationships’ on the same footing as traditional marriage, it seems as if at least one durable relationship already has been validated by the highest court in the land. The why of that we will learn later, but for now, John again takes up the story of life with the woman he loved.
‘My plan was to go back to New York,’ John says, ‘but I stayed around for a lot longer after meeting Michelle. After a couple of years, we decided to move to the UK to just try something different.’
Michelle got a job there with AIB, and John worked in construction. ‘We were well settled there and we both had good jobs, and we bought an apartment in Neasden in London,’ he says. Their first child, daughter Aoife, now 16, was born there, and that led to a decision. ‘We had this thing in our head that we wanted to stay there, but it was a bit of a dream until the reality hit of how hard it is to raise a child, let alone in London.’
Michelle got a transfer with the bank back to Ireland, and John found plenty of work in construction, and they bought a house in Toomevara, near Nenagh. Two sons followed, Jack and Tommy, who now are 15 and 13 respectively.
Then, in 2018, came devastating news — Michelle was diagnosed with breast cancer. ‘We never told the kids, which will give you an idea of the kind of person she was, because, like, she went through full surgery, chemo, radiation therapy, everything, and the three kids never knew she had cancer. The only time I ever told them about it was when she got Covid and she was intubated on a ventilator.’
John still has no idea how Michelle contracted Covid, but his memory of what happened next is both vivid and heartbreaking. ‘She was feeling ill, but she had a checkup a couple of months before that, a regular cancer check-up, and it was all clear, kind of remission. You know, move on — it was “happy days!”. But when she started feeling ill again, she was worried.’
Then Michelle tested positive for Covid. ‘She was relieved, because it wasn’t the cancer coming back,’ John says. She spent a week on the Covid ward in University Hospital Limerick, and was sent home a week before Christmas. ‘But on Christmas day, she was shook, and on St Stephen’s morning, she couldn’t breathe, so I rang the ambulance,’ John says. ‘Back in UHL, she went straight to the high-dependency unit. When she was in the HDU, she was texting me. She was WhatsApping, and when a message came through, you’d know she was bored. We were never really concerned, because she was fit and healthy, and young people usually came through it.’
One day, she told John she had just done an online Tesco shop. Life was as normal as it could be under the circumstances, even mundane. That night, though, he got a call from the hospital to say Michelle had been intubated on a ventilator and that someone would update him the next morning. ‘I
THEY WERE BEING TREATED UNEQUALLY WITH OTHER CHILDREN
took the kids out for a walk in the forest out behind us, and while we were there, I got a call from one the consultant who was looking after Michelle, and she asked me if I understood what was going on there. I said, “yes, I know she’s sick, but she’s going to be fine”.
Then came the chilling words no one ever wants to hear. ‘John,’ the consultant said, ‘I think Michelle is going to die.’
On 31 January 2021, Michelle passed away, before she and John had the chance to get married as they finally had planned, and that’s when he decided to apply for the widower’s pension.
‘We had been working all our lives, and I kind of had this impression in my head that there must be some sort of assistance for me, you know,’ he says. John was refused because he wasn’t married, and the suggestion was that he sign on for unemployment benefit, even though as a self-employed agricultural consultant and construction worker, there was plenty of work available. Ironically, instead of giving him a helping hand in the absence of Michelle’s regular salary and leaving him a net contributor to the Exchequer, the State suggestion was that he become a drain on it, an idea he finds risible.
Nonetheless, his immediate focus was closer to home. The children were settled in school and, despite
being so young, they were coping well with the death of their mother. ‘I was really worried about Tommy that time but he turned out to be the opposite,’ John says. ‘He was very, very attached to his mother. She could go nowhere without him wanting to be with her. The other two were always a bit more free — they’d run away with anyone, like! But they all actually coped really, really well. Really well.
‘They did get a lot of time with Michelle through her time in hospital. The patient advocacy people, the Pals team in UHL, were great, and even when Michelle was in a coma, they were speaking to her on the phone every night anyway. Little things like that helped.’ On his own, John realised that the support network that swings in immediately after a tragic loss ultimately has to move on — ‘people have their own lives and problems,’ he says pragmatically — but he had the advantage that he and Michelle shared most household duties anyway, though it wasn’t always plain sailing. ‘I remember going to do the shopping and panicking and thinking, am I really able to do this?’ John says. ‘It’s silly, but in your mind, you’re thinking the worst all the time, like.’
He can cook, which is a help, though he laughs about it because, as he says, most people assume a man who works in construction can’t cook at all. ‘The kids keep asking for chilli con carne and spaghetti Bolognese, that sort of stuff, but I would cook everything,’ John laughs. ‘They reckon I do the best fry. Their mother couldn’t do a fry like me — she made it too healthy!’
As time passed, though, the issue of the widower’s pension wasn’t going away, and the children knew about it too. ‘I would tell them straight up they were being treated unequally with other children, whose parents had been married,’ John says, ‘and they understood that part of it.’ Indeed, they too ended up petitioners in the court case.
John got in with Treoir, the association for unmarried parents, which in conjunction with FLAC, the free legal aid centre, agreed to take on his case, and he generated publicity by going on RTÉ’s Today With Claire Byrne show to highlight the inequality. Despite that momentum, the first attempt in the High Court was unsuccessful, and the feeling was that the case ultimately would have to go all the way to the European Court. Instead, the Supreme Court agreed to hear it, and the stakes were high. John’s own costs were covered, but if he lost, he potentially was on the hook for the State’s legal fees. This week, that proved unnecessary, as the Supreme Court vindicated his right to a widower’s pension on the grounds that to deny it would be to discriminate against his children. Treoir’s Sinéad Murray explains. ‘The judgment was based on two kind of parts,’ she says. ‘One was the rights of the children, in that they have no say over whether their parents get married or not. So even though parents do have a choice there, the children don’t, therefore you can’t discriminate based on their parents’ marital status.
‘The other thing is that under Article 40.1 of the Constitution, you have the right to be treated under equally under the law, and the court wasn’t convinced that John O’Meara himself has been treated equally, and that the distinction between the two families, the gap between a married family and a cohabiting couple, wasn’t big enough, and it was capricious to make that distinction.’ The judgement does not guarantee the rights of a surviving partner in the absence of children, or if the children are adults, and that is another battle that will have to be fought, but Treoir nonetheless estimates it will impact about 10,000 couples in similar situations.
The support of the Treoir, FLAC, and local TD Alan Kelly, was vital to John’s court success, but that is not to underestimate his own zeal that he should be treated equally, and his tenacity to ensure it happened, despite a legal process he admits was intimidating.
Would Michelle have done the same if the situation was reversed? ‘I think Michelle would have fought, yes, I do think Michelle would have fought,’ John says. ‘I think she would be very proud of what I’ve done. She is the driving force behind all of this and she would be 100% behind me.
‘She lived for her family and that was all that mattered to her. There’s no way she would have accepted second best for her family, I know that much. That was always the way she lived.’
And what about the process, then? Did having this focus somehow relieve of him of the everyday burden of grief?
‘It was a secondary thing, but sometimes I think it actually prolonged things, because I didn’t have time to think back on other stuff, you know?’ John says. ‘I would like not to have had to do it, for sure.’
Devoted mother: Michelle with her three children when they were younger, during a birthday celebration
MICHELLE LIVED FOR HER FAMILY AND THAT WAS ALL THAT MATTERED