Simplistic to present the 1980s as a dark and repressive time

The phrase “Ireland’s dark past” has well and truly entered the national consciousness. We come across it in articles, hear it on the radio, in TV documentaries, in movies and in general conversation.

Our “dark past” used to refer mainly to the period from the foundation of the Irish State in 1922 until maybe the 1960s, or at a push into the 1970s. But now I notice that it is being brought ever closer to the present and has reached the 1980s. In due course it will probably be pushed closer still, until perhaps it finally reaches May 2018, the month we repealed the 8th amendment and so were finally ‘liberated’ from the clutches of our Catholic past.

The idea of Ireland’s “dark past”, which is always associated with the Catholic Church, is now commonplace abroad. There was a recent BBC series called ‘The Woman in the Wall’. It is set in the present and focusses on a woman traumatised by her time in a Magdalene laundry. You could tell by reading the reviews that the reviewers particularly associated the Magdalen laundries with (a) Ireland and (b) the Catholic Church.

None seemed aware that such institutions were common in Britain and elsewhere once upon a time, were mainly run by Protestant organisations, or that the first one in Ireland was founded by a member of the Church of Ireland, a Lady Arabella Denny, in the late 18th century when the Catholic Church still operated under the penal laws. Incidentally, Lady Denny was genuinely trying to get ‘fallen women’ back on the straight and narrow when she founded her Magdalen home.

In any event, I mention all this because a new movie has just opened in our cinemas called ‘Small Things Like These’. It stars Cillian Murphy as the hero of the story and is based on an award-winning book of the same name that came out in 2021.

The setting is New Ross in Co. Wexford. The year is 1985. Murphy plays local coal delivery man, Bill Furlong. He is disturbed by what is going on in the local convent and the treatment of the young women in its Magdalen laundry.

The villain of the story is the head nun, Sr Mary, played with ‘authoritarian menace’ by Emily Watson. Can you remember the last time a movie or TV series set in Ireland depicted a nun in a sympathetic way? Nuns have all been reduced to horror movie caricatures, the one group of women we are allowed, no, often encouraged, to hate.

‘Small Things Like These’ does not look like it is set in the mid-1980s. It looks more like the 1950s”

What caught my attention about the movie, other than the theme, is the time period in which the story in set, that is the mid-1980s. This is because I came to adulthood in the 1980s. I left school, when to university and got my first proper job. Therefore, I have a strong living memory of the time. When I read and hear that the 1950s (say) were a very dark time, I cannot answer this with any first-hand knowledge. I have no doubt that aspects of the 1950s were dark, and for some, very dark. On the other hand, when I used to listen to my parents and their contemporaries speak about their time as young adults in that era, most of their memories seem to have been happy ones. So, simply speaking about “Ireland’s dark past” does not capture the full story of those years.

‘Small Things Like These’ does not look like it is set in the mid-1980s. It looks more like the 1950s. There was a Magdalen home in New Ross, but it was no longer operating in 1985. In fact, it has closed down in 1967, almost 20 years before. So why not set the story then, which would have made more sense?

Perhaps the idea is precisely to bring our “dark past” closer to the present.

Darkness

I do not associate the 1980s with ‘darkness’ and ‘repression’, or a ‘cruel and authoritarian’ Church. Some people will say this is because I was a middle-class male growing up in that time and therefore I had a different experience to many other people, and that is obviously true. But in every era different people will experience their time in different ways.

Looking back on the 1980s, few of my contemporaries, either male or female, seemed particularly repressed, quite the reverse in many cases”

For example, in years to come, how will all those people who are young now remember this time? There will be plenty of stories of rampant anxiety, depression and self-harm. If we are so liberated now, why is that happening?

But looking back on the 1980s, few of my contemporaries, either male or female, seemed particularly repressed, quite the reverse in many cases. The Church was far more dominant back then than now, but the era of severe corporal punishment was more or less a thing of past, in my school at any rate, and in the one my sisters went to. The priests I remember from my school were a benign bunch in the main, with one notable exception who later turned out to have sexually abused boys, although he presented himself as benign, as child abusers tend to.

Stigma

The stigma of being a single mother was also lifting during those years. In 1980, only 5% of children were born outside marriage, but by 1990 this has trebled to about 15%. By 2000, the figure had reached one birth in three.

Some of my friends had strict parents, and plenty did not. You did hear stories of strict nuns, but few enough of properly cruel ones.

But for the most part we barely spoke about the Church at all. Divorce and abortion referendums took place in the 1980s, but a proposal to legalise divorce went down by a two-to-one margin, and the 8th amendment become part of the Constitution by the same margin. That was the democratic will.

I do remember plenty of arguments about Charlie Haughey and Garret FitzGerald and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but very few, if any, about John Paul II and whoever happened to be the local bishop.

The 1980s was when big music acts began to come to Ireland regularly and play at Slane Castle, hardly a scene of darkness and repression. These concerts were a dominant image of the 1980s for many young people.

What was the big dark cloud that seemed to loom overhead of a lot of the time? It wasn’t the Catholic Church, and it wasn’t some terrible lack of sexual freedom. It was the dismal state of the economy. By far and away, this was the big negative we talked about at the time. We wondered when we left university whether we would ever get a decent job.

But was the 1980s in general repressive? I do not believe it was, and it is disservice to that time to present it as such”

This was another of our eras of high emigration. Many young people went off to England or America. I went to Australia at the very end of 1986. Back in those days Gay Byrne used to joke that the last person to leave would have to turn out the lights.

Yes, there were obviously people who would have experienced the 1980s as repressive, including gay people, and there still would have been some women experiencing the stigma of having a baby outside marriage, even if that stigma was declining.

But was the 1980s in general repressive? I do not believe it was, and it is disservice to that time to present it as such. It is both simplistic and inaccurate to reduce the 1980s to stories such as ‘Small Things Like These’.

If there is a movie set in the Ireland of that time which does capture the era a bit better, then try out the Commitments again. Not much repression on display there.