The recently published report of the Ferns sex abuse inquiry gives a timely reminder of how things once were in Ireland. A generation ago, the structure of our society was very different.
It’s hard for anyone under 35 to understand just how different it was before Gay Byrne read out letters from abused women on his radio show, before the revelations of the horrors and cruelty of the Magdalen laundries, before feminism and before the McGee case that paved the way for the sale of contraceptives in this country.
Once, we danced at the crossroads and women had to leave their jobs in public service on marriage. Just think of the presumptions!
Who now recalls the contraceptive train? Who now remembers that women couldn’t wear trousers in UCD? Who now recalls the craven compromise of Charles Haughey’s ‘Irish solution to an Irish problem’ which meant contraceptives could only be bought on prescription? Who now recalls the divorce and abortion civil wars?
Who now recalls Ann Lovett bleeding to death in the Granard grotto, the revelation of her bleak and lonely death condemned by the parish priest as ‘giving scandal’? That misguided man couldn’t see that the real scandal was to hide from the truth, to refuse to acknowledge that life was as we found it and that sexuality was the fast-flowing fount of life without which we might have less heartache but without which we also had no life at all...
Giving scandal? We didn’t have a clue what was coming: floods of revelation, dam-burst after dam-burst. Everything changed utterly and our present terrible beauty was born.
There was a moment where you could see it take shape. The baby boomer feminists and liberals had broken through to establish a bridgehead into the modern world. The Pope’s visit was intended to sucker Ireland back into the fold. Instead, it turned out to be a watershed.
By the late 1980s, when the boomers had children, we had the youngest population in Europe. As the economy stabilised we became consumers, then we got rich. We became modern Europeans.
Our football fans charmed the continent. Cheap flights winged us further afield. We sang and danced our way across the globe.
Being Irish was ultra-cool. Being Irish was sexy. I walked down Grafton Street in 1994 and a BBC reporter stopped me and asked me about this cool Dublin full of rockstars and models and designers. I told her the city was full of young people and money and that when those two combine you get sex and drugs and rock’n’roll.
And so it proved. Manhattan came to town. Sex and the city was us. Sisters did it for themselves.
The relationships between women and society and between women and men have changed completely. Whereas women’s underachievement in education was once a staple of feminist analysis, now the boot is on the other foot, in Ireland as elsewhere in Europe. Women outperform men in virtually all aspects of education. They also cheerfully exercise their economic independence. Manolos to go.
There’s a downside – young women also now out-drink young men across (or perhaps that’s under) the table. In fact, while Irish 15-year-old males are only in fourth place in the European bingeing league, Irish female 15-year-olds are in top spot.
The result? A media full of shock horrors about scantily clad and drunken young women swearing, shagging, puking and fighting their way through each successive weekend. One priest gave us the memorable image of teenage girls in his parish who ‘only get down on their knees to give a blow job’.
Not representative of course, but the red tops love it. And it has sparked an interesting development. Now Official Ireland choruses its disapproval and incomprehension of its wanton daughters. Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly triggered a chorus of cheers from even the ranks of Tuscany last year with her sniffy disapproval of the way we have become. And that means you, girls.
They don’t quite want you to cover up, shut up and wear a veil, but they’d like to see and hear you less. This is a common ground where old Catholic conservatives meet embarrassed liberals in mid-life, or perhaps parental, crisis. Now they’re finding other allies. One of the things that immigrants say, according to some reports at least, is that they are offended by the amounts of flesh on show, by the loudness and vulgarity of the language used and by the drinking and assertiveness.
An interesting new challenge is emerging for Irish women as we enter the 21st century and as we embrace the post-modern world. It’s to maintain their hard-won independence and freedom against inroads from not only old Ireland but new Ireland as well. Interesting times ahead! b