Nice victors now have the floor

Here is the way it worked in magical, mystical Ireland. You were a haemophiliac and the public services that were supposed to mind you had infected you with a lethal virus. You had your HIV test and you waited, prayed and hoped against hope. One day the phone call came. The results were ready. You went in to see Dr Helena Daly, the temporary head of the National Haemophilia Treatment Centre at St James's Hospital in Dublin.

She gave you the bad news as gently as possible, but there was no point in being too gentle about the implications of the virus that was now lodged ineradicably in your immune system. Dr Daly had to talk straight to you about intimate, painful things, like the fact that making love to your wife or girlfriend now had a terrible, dangerous dimension. The act of love now had to come wrapped in a condom.

But the doctor couldn't just give you condoms. Charles Haughey's Irish solution to an Irish problem had seen to that. Condoms were available only on prescription from a chemist, and then only to married couples whom the doctor trusted to use them for bona fide family planning purposes.

So Dr Daly sent you out to the hospital car-park. A young man, Brian O'Mahony of the Irish Haemophilia Society, was waiting for you and he ushered you over to his car. Quietly, secretly, he opened the boot and took out some condoms for you. If you needed more, he would be there most Wednesday evenings after work.

This image, from Brian O'Mahony's evidence to the Lindsay tribunal earlier this month, ought to be burned into our brains. We should remember, in the light of Terry Keane's emergence as his mistress, the grotesque hypocrisy of Haughey's legislation. We should think about the way this State made the victims of its own negligence feel that their desire to have a normal sex life was the kind of shameful, sordid craving that involves furtive assignations in car-parks. We should reflect, above all, on the distance we have come since 1985, when these grotesque scenes were being played out in the capital city.

You can measure that distance, indeed, simply by noting some of the people who, while Brian O'Mahony was handing out condoms in the hospital car-park, were voting to keep this sick situation as the law of the land. At that time, coincidentally, Barry Desmond as Minister for Health was proposing to liberalise the contraception laws. Among those who voted against his bill were senior members of the present Government such as Bertie Ahern, Mary Harney, Charlie McCreevy, Mary O'Rourke and Joe Walsh.

Among them too was Padraig Flynn, who told the Dail: "The fashionable length of a lady's skirt or width of a gent's trousers might change but the right for young unmarried teenagers to fornicate is still unnatural and wrong." Yet, just over a decade later, as the EU Commissioner for Social Affairs, the same Padraig Flynn, was sending out as part of a HIV awareness campaign 300,000 Valentine's Day cards with condoms attached.

THE reason for Flynn's about-face and what it represents in terms of the national consensus can be encapsulated in two letters: EU. In his case, the transition from Castlebar to Brussels literally changed the context. For most of the rest of us, the change of context was less literal but no less tangible. It is the EU which has underwritten the modernisation of Irish society and let some air into a claustrophobic culture of casual cruelties and strange obsessions.

To put it crudely, the Common Agricultural Policy bought off conservative Ireland and stitched it into a modernising project that it would otherwise have rejected. Now, with the rejection of the Nice Treaty, that project has been stopped in its tracks. And because the changes in Irish society in the last 30 years have been so inextricably bound up with the development of the EU, the implications of that vote go very deep. We have to consider not just where Europe is going but where Ireland is and where it wants to be.

Thus what we need to hear from those who clearly and fairly won the Nice campaign is not just their vision of the EU, but their vision of Ireland. Some of them, of course, are people who would have been entirely enthusiastic about the social and legislative changes that happened in the 1980s and 1990s. But I suspect that the most influential group in terms of getting the No vote out were essentially the same people who have campaigned so effectively in the various divorce and anti-abortion referendums of the same period.

Having now shut up the liberal establishment, they have the floor. Having stopped the Eurotrain in its tracks, they have the opportunity to tell us where they think we should be going. With the moral authority of a crushing victory behind them, they have a right to be heard and a duty to articulate the alternative vision they want us to pursue.

So what precisely are the values they wish to preserve against the European assault? What are the great Irish traditions they wish to carry on into the 21st century? Do they include the noble tradition of sending mortally ill people out to the car-park for secret supplies of condoms? And do we really want to go back into that world?

fotoole@irish-times.ie