THAT CLASSIC Haugheyism, “an Irish solution to an Irish problem”, has become a euphemism for the worst in our nod-and-wink political culture, for hypocrisy on stilts. Instead of dealing with a problem, we delay, pretend to address it, say we’ve dealt with it and dress a “solution” up in the green flag. And the afflicted find their own “Irish solutions”, usually involving a blatant disregard for the unenforced law.
Marking tomorrow the 50th birthday of the availability in the US of the Pill, that liberator of women or promoter of sexual libertinism, depending on your perspective, it is worth recalling its part in Ireland’s long struggle with social conservatism: the 15-year campaign for legalisation, the ground-breaking McGee constitutional case, and the farce of the 1978 Health (Family Planning) Bill legalising its prescription for married couples for “bona-fide family planning purposes”.
Minister for Health, Charles Haughey’s description of the Bill in the Dáil brought from Labour’s Barry Desmond a worthy rejoinder that, clearly, “Irish women have some unique aspects of sexuality unknown in other European countries. Irish men possess unique aspects of sexuality unknown to other males in Europe. Therefore, we must have a uniquely Irish solution to the problem”.
The Bill passed. And doctors continued to prescribe the Pill not as a contraceptive but a “cycle regulator” to the large numbers of Irish women who apparently had irregular cycles. In 1985 the nonsense was ended. We have moved on to a better place.
In retrospect the Pill’s record vindicated neither the more extravagant claims of its detractors nor advocates. The sexual revolution and growing acknowledgment of women’s sexual rights and autonomy were well under way before its widespread availability. For some years there had already been evidence that women’s desire to enter the workforce in larger numbers was leading to a decline in family sizes, by whatever means. An end to poverty in the third world? A cure for divorce? The elimination of unmarried pregnancy? Clearly not.
But, yes, the Pill has made millions of women’s lives easier. It has been a facilitator, not precipitator, of many of the liberating changes that have allowed women over decades make new choices about family and work, and to take a new control over, and responsibility for, their own bodies and lives, socially and sexually. Not least it has done so by contributing to the de facto separation of sex and reproduction which sooner or later the Catholic Church must face up to.
