A hateful fantasy

Claims that Ireland was repressed in the 1980s are absurd, writes David Quinn

‘Why were we so hateful?’, the editorial in the Irish Examiner asked of Irish people living in the 1980s. A feature last weekend in the Irish Independent described the same decade as “traumatising” for women.

The 1980s is in the spotlight because of the Majella Moynihan case which has received huge publicity. Ms Moynihan was a trainee garda when she became pregnant in 1984. The father was another trainee at Templemore. Because she was not married, she faced disciplinary procedures and even the sack. The father received a fine.

The case was covered at the time, although she was not named, and the actions of the Gardaí were widely attacked including by a pro-life group called ‘Women for Life’.

Ms Moynihan was saved from the sack by the intervention of the then Archbishop of Dublin, Kevin McNamara, who worried that the precedent would encourage women to travel to England for abortions.

He intervened at the request of a Cura worker named Mena Robinson, who Ms Moynihan said has been very kind to her. She said she would ensure Ms Moynihan would not lose her job.

In the end, Majella Moynihan gave up her child for adoption. She felt pressured to do so because of her circumstances and lack of support.

Influence

Even though Archbishop McNamara helped to ensure she was not sacked, the fact that she faced such a situation at all because she was pregnant outside marriage is being held up as another example of how unfriendly Ireland was to women back then under the baleful influence of the Catholic Church.

There can be no doubt that traditional societies treated unmarried mothers and their children cruelly, and in the 1980s some of this attitude remained.

Other cases are cited, for example that of Joanna Hayes and the ‘Kerry babies’, and Ann Lovett who died in childbirth aged 15 at a grotto in Granard, Co. Longford in 1985.

But to paint the 1980s as the new 1950s is, simply…absurd. You cannot paint an entire decade in dark colours because of unrepresentative cases such as the ones just mentioned.

The 1980s were, in fact, the decade when the sex revolution really began to take hold in Ireland. Contraception had been made legally available for the first time in 1978 and from then on, they became more and more available.

You cannot paint an entire decade in dark colours because of unrepresentative cases such as the ones just mentioned”

A sure sign that things were changing fast was the rapid rise in the number of births outside marriage in the 1980s. The old taboos against sex outside marriage were disappearing.

Some of the iconic images of the 1980s are from the huge concerts which took place at Slane Castle in that decade. The Rolling Stones played there in 1982. It also hosted Queen, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. ‘Repressed’ is not the word that springs to mind when you look at those images.

I was at Dublin City University during the early to mid-1980s (the NIHE as it was called then). At this stage in my life I was only nominally Catholic, and it was the same for most of my friends, who were mainly from the country. Some of them were no longer even nominal in their faith. Young people were already drifting away from the Church by the 1980s. It is fair to say that we were not a devout bunch and we did not feel ‘repressed’. That goes for both sexes.

The Church was simply not a ‘shadow’ over our lives at that point. There was a chaplain at DCU, a very nice man. He was anything but the ‘moral police’.

Conversations

The referendums of the 1980s came up a bit in our lunchtime conversations or over a pint, but the big cloud for us was not the moral climate. Instead, it the rotten state of the economy. It’s why so many of us had to go overseas in search of work after graduation. Aside from that we talked about exams, the opposite sex, Charlie Haughey vs Garret FitzGerald, and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

It is true that homosexual acts between men were still criminalised in the 1980s (I supported the decriminalisation when that happened in 1993).

It’s also true that Garret’s attempt to allow divorce was defeated by two-to-one in the referendum of 1986, and in 1983 we passed the Eighth Amendment, also in a two-to-one vote.

Critics of the 1980s attack those two votes as evidence of social repression, but if they are, then we did it to ourselves, and by very big margins.

What about today? Do we live in a less ‘dark’ time now? Violent crime is up compared with the 1980s. There has been a spate of women murdered. Suicide is up. Marital breakdown is up. People seem less neighbourly than they were. Social media is often a cesspit. Hard-core pornography is all-pervasive.

Even back in 1985, Majella Moynihan was told by a senior colleague that she should have had an abortion. What must the pressure be like now?”

Political correctness has turned into a form of bullying. Anti-Catholic sentiment is rife. Drug abuse is rife. Recorded sexual offences are on the rise.

The two youngest people ever have been just found guilty of the murder of a teenage girl. We have had the horrible case at Holles Street of a perfectly healthy baby being aborted after it was mistakenly believed the child had a ‘fatal foetal abnormality’.

Healthy babies are being routinely and legally aborted every day all over the country in any case.

A pilots’ representative has spoken of the pressure women pilots on casual contracts can feel to abort their children.

Even back in 1985, Majella Moynihan was told by a senior colleague that she should have had an abortion. What must the pressure be like now?

The idea that the 1980s was an awful and repressive time and that today we are far more compassionate and enlightened does not stand up to the evidence.

Yes, there was a dark side to life in the 1980s, but it is exaggerated, and there are many dark sides to life today. That is to put it very mildly.