The conflicts and tensions that currently exist between tradition and modernity in various parts of the world means that women's relationship to religious institutions remains an important focus of study. Modernisation, characterised by industrialisation, institutional differentiation, pluralism, privatisation, individualism and authority by consent rather than decree, holds out the promise of liberation for women but seriously threatens the hold that patriarchal, authoritarian regimes have on society generally and women in particular. Modern technologies and telecommunications systems have produced a globalised culture that is seen by traditionalists worldwide as an intrusion into their way of life and a threat to their native cultures, including religious prescriptions of gender roles and functions. This has given rise to a resurgence of fundamentalist religious movements in many parts of the world that uphold the marginalisation and denigration of women. Even advanced western countries are experiencing 'culture wars' (Hunter 1991) between those who accept modernity and those who reject scientific and secular explanations as the basis for the moral norms of society, especially in relation to gender roles and sexuality. This article explores the situation in Ireland where the Roman Catholic Church has been in the vanguard of traditionalist forces seeking to inhibit the forces of modernity that held out the prospects of full equality for women in all spheres of life.
By the end of the nineteenth century Ireland was fast losing its language and cultural traditions due to centuries of British colonisation and the devastation of the Great Famine. In the struggle for independence and in its efforts to regain and reassert its own national identity nationalists found in Catholicism, which had long historical links to Ireland's Gaelic past, a collective, unifying marker identity (Larkin 1975: 649). Feminists writing about nationalist independence struggles worldwide have shown that in nationalist discourse a woman is not seen as an autonomous person but as a site of contestation and a native woman's body is the territory over which male power is exercised. In Irish nationalist literature women are exalted as “emblematic mothers and desexualised spiritual maidens” in need of protection (Kiberd 1995: 406). This nationalist stereotyping of women seems to be the case worldwide. Ideals of femininity and exalted motherhood are promoted in order to constrain women's behaviour within the very limited roles of moral guardians of the nation and guarantor's of their men's status long after independence is achieved (Meaney 1993: 233; Nandy 1983). This process of control can be seen at work in the status accorded to Irish women after independence. The identification of Catholicism with nationalism was enhanced after independence in 1921 when the Roman Catholic Church was acknowledged in the Constitution as having a special position in Irish society, being the religion of ninety-three percent of the population. Catholicism provided not only a ready-made identity, but also symbols of tradition and continuity that gave cohesion and stability to the new and fragile independent Irish Free State, a situation welcomed by the political, economic and social elites of the day (Hogan 1987). The new state was not a theocracy but a democracy with a separation of powers between the state, the church and the judiciary. However, the church's extensive interests in education and health care meant that it had a very strong input into government policy making in these areas. Women had full equality in the new democracy, but this was eroded during the decades following independence due mainly to male politicians' reliance on church teaching in relation to women.
The Roman Catholic perception of women comes from two sources: the work of men such as Augustine and Aquinas, in which a woman's biology determines her destiny, and nineteenth century 'pedestalism' which saw women as morally superior human beings (Paul 1996: 113: Tavard 1973: 137). Mary, virgin, and mother, is the model for all women and motherhood is the fullest expression of a married woman's vocation in life. Nationalists found it easy to support the Church's teaching on women that legitimated and encouraged traditional views of a woman's 'natural' role as submissive wife and mother as they held similar views about women and their roles and function in society. As elected politicians they enacted legislation on marriage, the family and employment that was informed by Catholic social teaching. Women were quickly marginalised in the new state, but feminist activists did not passively accept this situation. It is argued here that women continually resisted the erosion of their constitutional rights and the intention of the church and state legislators to restrict them to the narrow confines of private and familial roles. This article is divided into two sections. The first section analyses the introduction and implementation of restrictive legislation in the decades after independence and the second section examines women's struggle for reproductive rights and the right to divorce from the 1970s onwards.
The Irish elites who exercised power in the first fifty years of the state's existence shared the common objectives of rebuilding an Irish national consciousness free of foreign influences and the creation of a State based on the philosophy of Catholic nationalism. At the time there was a general concern that the moral laxity evident in other western countries was infiltrating Ireland via the media and entertainment industry, undermining and corrupting the cultural and religious integrity of the new state (Whyte 1980: 25). Women were seen as playing key roles in relation to this incoming tide of corruption. The Council of Irish bishops warned that: "The evil one is ever setting his snares for unwary feet. At the moment, his traps for the innocent are chiefly the dance hall, the bad book, the indecent paper, the motion picture, the immodest fashion in female dress - all of which tend to destroy the virtues characteristic of our race" (Carlson 1990 :9; Kelly 1993: 189).
The clergy campaigned vigorously to outlaw new 'jazz-dancing' and to shut down unlicensed and unsupervised dance-halls, as they firmly believed that such places were occasions of sin. They were supported by magistrates and journalists who also blamed dances and dance halls for a variety of evils including rape and illegitimacy (O'Dowd 1987: 20). Traditional Irish dancing, on the other hand, was morally uplifting and, in the words of one bishop, did not make 'degenerates' (Keogh 1996: 106). Mothers were often condemned as careless and neglectful in allowing their daughters to attend public dance halls and cinemas unchaperoned.
Traditionalists often portrayed the young modern woman as beyond the control of family and church and, with her ready acceptance of foreign influences in behaviour and dress, she became a convenient scapegoat for all that was evil and alien to the Catholic and Gaelic ethos of the new state. The Cork Examiner reported the Pope as saying that the modern woman's disregard for modesty and reverence was a potential threat to the social order and he urged Catholic men to exert control over such deviant behaviour. The Catholic hierarchy in many countries echoed the Pope's attack on modernity, but in Ireland the warning words were usually couched within a cultural nationalist discourse (Ryan 1998: 183). Individual clerics bemoaned the fact that some Irish girls wore "such scanty drapery as could only be exceeded in the slave markets of pagan countries". Women were exhorted to adopt "an Irish standard of dress instead of imitating those foreign importations which offend Christian refinement". Mothers were called upon to dress their daughters in Irish fabrics - heavy, solid tweeds which covered rather than draped the body (Valiulis 1995: 172). The clergy, whose sermons were widely reported in the press, did not hesitate to call on the Mary/Eve dualism to reinforce their message of Catholic patriotism. Archbishop Gilmartin of Tuam was reported as saying that the traditional pious Irish woman was the sister of Mary Immaculate, whereas the modern woman who welcomed the bad influences creeping in from abroad was behaving as Eve, the evil temptress, who drew men to their ruin. He warned women that the very future of the country was bound up with the dignity and purity of all Irish women (Ryan 1998: 189; Keogh 1996: 106). The same message was reinforced in Catholic schools and colleges throughout the country and many women responded positively to these calls to religious and nationalistic authenticity. Students at a teacher's training college run by the Mercy Sisters in Limerick, for example, launched The Mary Immaculate Modest Dress and Deportment Crusade with the aim of rescuing "Irish maidenhood from the grip of the pagan world". Its members were exhorted to dress modestly and to refrain from smoking, drinking, or talking or laughing loudly in public and warned that "the Irishwoman who is ashamed to be a true child of Mary is a sham Irishwoman" (Beaumont 1997: 568). The opposition articulated in clerical and public discourse between the modest, patriotic, well-behaved woman and the unruly woman susceptible to alien influences enabled conservative lay activists and clerical lobbyists to persuade the government to bring in censorship laws that protected and enforced traditional Catholic and nationalist ideals of womanhood.
The first censorship law enacted was The Censorship of Films Act (1923). The Censorship Board set up under the Act took a very restricted view of what constituted 'indecent and obscene'. All dancing perceived to be indecent or lascivious was banned and depiction of extra-marital relationships, marital infidelity and divorce could not be presented in a positive light. While appeal against the Board's decision was possible, very few appeals were successful. The 1929 Censorship of Publications Act was equally strict so that virtually any printed material that contained references to sexuality was banned. Groups such as The Catholic Truth Society and the League of Decency were vigilant in bringing the attention of the Censorship Board to printed material that they considered offensive. Modern Women, for example, was banned in the 1950s for featuring bathing suits. However, as Mary Kelly points out, the more serious consequence of such restrictive legislation was that it presented images of a sanitised sexuality that gave precedence to motherhood and family and ignored representations of women as complex and sexual human beings (Kelly 1993: 189).
The 1929 Censorship of Publications Act also specified that no publication that advocated artificial birth control techniques or abortion could be printed, published, sold or distributed. This reflected the Church's condemnation of artificial birth control and in 1933 the Vatican requested the Irish government to formally protest against a League of Nations directive on the use of birth control and it readily complied with the request (Keogh 1995: 109). Not surprisingly, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 1935 included an article that prohibited the sale and importation of birth control devices. Women who had the means to travel, even if it was only to Northern Ireland or the British Isles, could get some respite from censorship and contraceptive laws. However, this group made up a very small portion of the population and it was women without financial resources and women in poor health that bore the worst brunt of these laws.
While the censorship laws protected and reinforced the ideal of the Catholic equation of women with motherhood, the government's reliance on Catholic Social Teaching in relation to employment legislation had the effect of limiting women's employment options and career opportunities, thus ensuring that the majority of women had no alternative but to remain within the home. Three of the themes that pervade this body of teaching proved to be distinctly disadvantageous to any woman contemplating taking up paid employment outside the home: (1) the male as sole breadwinner (2) the concept of the family wage; and (3) women's incapacity for certain occupations.
In his encyclical, Rerum Novarum (The Condition of Labour) Pope Leo (1878-1903) envisaged a patriarchal family with the father as breadwinner. While he condemned all forms of abuse or exploitation of women either by their spouses or by the economic, political or social systems, he declared that “a woman is by nature fitted for home work, and it is that which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty, promote the good bringing up of children and the well-being of the family” (Riley 1991). This gendered ideology disadvantaged women in a variety of ways. It did not take account of female breadwinners, it ignored inequalities in wages, and it left working women open to the accusation that they were driving down men's wages. Young female workers were often viewed as simply earning 'pin money' in the intervening years between school leaving and marriage. While the Irish economy was predominantly based on agriculture, during the 1920s and 1930s employment opportunities increased in light industry and the lower echelons of the civil service. The available jobs had traditionally been taken up by women, but in the prevailing climate of job shortages many argued that these jobs should be given to the men who had fought in the war of independence (Daly 1995: 108). In any event, in line with Catholic social teaching, heads of households were presumed to be male and the government's policy was to provide work for the male breadwinner. The marriage bar was applied throughout the civil service and the commissioner could require that a female applicant be unmarried or a widow. This was also the case in local government jobs. The few married women who remained employed by the civil service were in areas where recruitment proved difficult or where the job was non-pensionable, temporary or on a fee-paid basis. A wife's income was deemed to be her husband's for taxation purposes and a woman was not entitled to unemployment benefits as it was assumed that some man would provide for her (Scannell 1988: 128).
Even when the church acknowledged that women were present in the workplace the main concern of successive popes was with the male worker as head of the family. Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) was the first pope to give unqualified support to the principle of a family wage. He stated that he found it intolerable that mothers should have to work outside the home, to the neglect of their children, because their husband's wage was not enough to support a family. The concept of family wage decreed that the worker with many dependents needed a supplement to his normal wages so that his wife could stay at home (Camp 1990: 513). This cult of domesticity pursued by church and state made it very difficult for those advocating better working conditions for women or childcare for working mothers. In 1939 the government set up the Commission on Vocational Organisation to investigate vocational organisation following the principles and ideas put forward in the encyclical Quadragesimo anno (The Reconstruction of the Social Order) (1931). When female representatives from trades and professional organisations presented the Commission with the case for women generally, they were told by the acting chairman at the time, Bishop Browne, that they were only philanthropic ladies of leisure performing charity work. Consequently, they had no authority to ask for rights and services for homemakers since all they were interested in was getting women out of the home to work (Clear 1995: 185). Pius XI had already warned that alleged reformers were promoting this 'abuse' as female emancipation and he abhorred the idea that under Communism the woman was "withdrawn from the family and care of her children to be thrust instead into public and collective production under the same conditions as the man" (Camp 1990: 514)
The notion that women should not work under the same conditions as men and that certain jobs were unsuitable for women was first stated by Pope Leo XIII when he declared in Rerum Novarum that "… it is not right to demand of a woman or a child what a strong adult man is capable of doing or would be willing to do." (Riley 1989: 81). Later Benedict XV (1914-33) deplored the fact that women were in occupations "ill befitting their sex" and that others "abandoned the duties of housewife, for which they were fashioned, to cast themselves recklessly into the current of life" (Leonard 1995: 15). In 1925 women were barred from serving in the police and prison services. Despite constant lobbying of the Minister for Justice's Department from 1926 onwards, the question of recruiting women to these services did not reach the floor of the Dáil (the lower house of Parliament) for almost thirty years. It took another three years before the first women police were sworn into the service in 1958. They were paid less than men and were required to retire on marriage (Travers 1995: 162).
Some of the lowest paid jobs for women were in factories but even here women had difficulty in getting work, not only because they were seen as threatening men's jobs and wages, but also because the work was often classified as unsuitable for women. Some of the Irish clergy had even argued that: "In a Christian State women should be excluded even by law from occupations unbecoming or dangerous to female modesty. The employment of wives or mothers in factories or outside their own household should be strictly limited by legislation." (Valiulis 1995: 171).
The Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Éamon De Valera, sought advice from Church leaders concerning women and work. John Charles McQuaid (later cardinal), President of Blackrock College advised him that: "These feminists are very confused. Both Casti Connubi and Quadragesimo anno answer them. Men and women had not equal rights to work of the same kind, but equal rights to appropriate work" (Kiberd 1996: 405). In response the government tabled the Conditions of Employment Bill (1935) empowering the Minister for Industry and Commerce to make regulations limiting the proportion of women who could be employed in certain jobs and occupations which the Minister deemed unfit for female workers. The Irish Women Workers' Union vigorously opposed the Bill and even took their protests to the League of Nations Conference on the Status of Women in Geneva, but their efforts to influence the contents or course of the Bill failed. The Bill was passed and segregated employment was thereafter fixed by law (Conroy Jackson 1993: 74).
Two years later the perceived inferiority of women's physical capacity for certain types of work was almost inserted into the proposed Constitution drawn up by the Taoiseach. In the initial draft of the document he left out the words "without distinction of sex" found in the 1922 Constitution, but added a new qualification: "This shall not be held to mean that the State shall not in its enactments have due regard to difference of capacity, physical and moral, and of social function." The strongest and most concerted objections to this wording came from academic and professional women and women in unions. They accused de Valera of "striking at the rights of women under the cloak of the Constitution" and of "striking the death-knell of the working women". Eventually, he agreed to include a reference to "without distinction of sex" and omit the reference to the "inadequate strength" of women (Travers 1995: 160). While the employment legislation impacted negatively on all female employment and career opportunities, it was the most disadvantaged groups of women, that is those with little education and few employment skills, who were the most severely affected by the restrictive legislation. As so few opportunities were available for paid employment outside the home domestic work remained the modal category of employment for the majority of women. By 1951 the labour force participation rates for women was lower than in 1926 (Mahon 1994: 1284). Female emigration levels were high and between 1926 and 1961 approximately four hundred and forty-one thousand, mostly single, women emigrated from Ireland (Conroy Jackson 1993: 77).
One of the more interesting features of the Constitution is the fact that the words 'woman' and 'mother' are interchangeable. Article 41.2 states:
In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.
The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home. (Cited in Robinson 1979: 60).
Despite the protective wording of the Constitution the government did very little for women in the home. A woman's unpaid labour within the home was not recognised by Irish courts and did not entitle her to any share in the ownership of the home. Until the law was changed in 1965, a wife could be legally disinherited and left homeless in her husband's will. The custody of legitimate children belonged to the father unless the courts deemed him unfit. Deserted wives, unwed mothers and prisoners' wives were not entitled to financial aid as of right even when they were fulfilling their duties in the home. A woman had little protection from a violent husband and if she deserted him he was legally entitled to damages from anyone who aided or harboured her or committed adultery with her. Under common law then a woman's rights remained inferior to that of a man and the Constitution forbade divorce (Scannell 1988: 126-8).
A new economic policy adopted in the 1950s ended protectionism in favour of free trade and the government put a great deal of effort into attracting multi-national companies to set up in Ireland. However, it gave preference to companies that provided jobs specifically for male workers (Pyle 1990). Nevertheless, the significant shift in employment from agriculture to manufacturing and services created a demand for more workers and greater numbers of single women were able to enter the workforce. Ireland's entry into the European Economic Community in 1973 also facilitated women's greater workforce participation because the government had to comply with the Community's equality legislation and women could no longer be kept out of certain types of jobs (Ostner & Lewis 1995: 191). However, the church's position in relation to women in the workplace remained unchanged. On a visit to Ireland in 1979 Pope John Paul II urged:
May Irish mothers, young women and girls, not listen to those who tell them that working at a secular job, succeeding in a secular profession is more important than the vocation of giving life and caring for this life as a mother … I entrust this to Mary, bright Sun of the Irish Race. (Pope John Paul II at Limerick, October 1979 - Cited in McWilliams 1993: 83).
Despite the Pope's words, by the 1980s married women were also moving into the workforce and by 1996 accounted for just half of the female workforce and mothers represented a third of the female labour force (Galligan 1998: 109).
In 1972 a referendum was held to remove the clause relating to 'the special position' of the Catholic Church from the Constitution. The Church, in line with the principles of religious freedom outlined by Vatican II, approved the change, and on a 51 percent turnout 84 percent of voters said yes to the change (Busteed 1990: 92). Ireland was fast becoming a modern, pluralistic state. It had opened up to the outside world, and the influx of foreign cultural influences that had so troubled the conservatives within the church and the state in the 1920s, and which they had been so successful in curbing, came flooding in via modern telecommunications systems. Television, pirate radio, and satellite broadcasting opened Irish society to different lifestyles and ways of thinking and much of it was at variance with traditional Catholic values. Television talk-back shows provided a public forum for discussion and dissent on issues such as domestic violence and birth control, topics which had formerly been deemed to be private matters between husbands and wives or as matters for discussion in the confessional. By the mid-1970s surveys found that the high levels of participation in weekly and monthly confession were in decline (O'Connor: 1998: 61). With expanded educational opportunities and higher labour force participation rates women were in a stronger position than hitherto to challenge state legislation in relation to matters affecting their lives, including the laws on reproductive rights and divorce. The Catholic Church was opposed to any change in the law in these areas. In 1971 the bishops issued a statement setting out the Church's position:
These questions involve issues of grave import for society as a whole, which go far beyond purely private morality or private religious belief. Civil law on these matters should respect the wishes of the people who elected the legislators and the bishops confidently hope that the legislators themselves will respect this important principle (Keogh 1996: 163).
In the 1970s the Irish Women's Liberation Movement (IWLM) saw contraception as the issue most central to women's lives and the one 'most likely to mobilise and/or radicalise the broader mass of women' (Smyth 1993: 260). Like other Catholic women around the world, the vast majority of Irish women were greatly disappointed when Pope VI condemned artificial birth control in his encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. Liberal members of the clergy were also disappointed, but the official stance taken by the Irish hierarchy as a body was one of obedience with papal teaching. The pill had been available in Ireland since 1963 as a 'cycle regulator' and was widely used by women who chose to follow the dictates of their own consciences, some with and some without the knowledge of their confessors. However, the pill was not suitable for all women, particularly women with hypertension. Also, many doctors would not prescribe the pill either from Catholic scruples or because they had concerns about its safety (Kenny 1997; Galligan 1998a).
The IWLM comprised a diversity of feminist groups subscribing to a common ideology of full emancipation for women. These groups were not always in agreement about the strategies, tactics and goals required to bring this about and intra-group tensions and disagreements were inevitable. Some of the more radical members staged what they believed was a very successful media event. They travelled north to Belfast where they bought condoms and other contraceptives and, on their return to Dublin, openly challenged the customs officials by distributing them to onlookers. No arrests were made and the event was given very wide media coverage. At least one priest's sermon condemned the outing as undignified and unworthy of Irish women. Moderates within the IWLM believed the scheme had backfired and that the incident had simply alarmed women outside the movement. Also, an opportunity had been lost to effectively demonstrate to the watching public the idiocy of the contraceptive laws. (Connolly 1996: 57; Randall 1986: 69)
Some activists believed that political lobbying would prove to be more effective in the long run and were encouraged by the fact that several backbenchers were prepared to raise the question of amending the laws on contraception in parliament. In 1971 three independent senators attempted to introduce a Bill to change the existing laws but the Bill was refused a reading and denied publication. A year later, two Labour backbenchers introduced a Bill and it too was defeated. Their actions were frowned upon by party and clergy alike. Reformers quickly discovered the power of the clergy and Catholic pressure groups to temporarily harden public opinion against change as public surveys demonstrated (Chubb 1994: 46). One opinion poll taken in 1971 showed that only 34 percent of people favoured a change in the law to make contraceptives publicly available (Galligan 1998a: 149).
The bishops issued a statement in 1973 pointing out that the Church's position was that artificial birth control was morally wrong regardless of any state law to the contrary. The Catholic position was that contraception was really a question of public morality. They acknowledged the right of legislators to change the law, but they pointed out that legislators had the grave responsibility of deciding "whether a change in the law would, on balance, do more harm than good, by damaging the character of the society for which they are responsible." (Keogh 1996: 165). They warned that the available evidence to date showed that the legalisation of contraception led to marital infidelity, higher rates of non-marital pregnancies, and an increase in the incidence of venereal disease. Also, a contraceptive mentality would adversely affect the way marriage and the family was perceived in society. Finally, they saw free access to contraceptives as the first step towards a much wider use of abortion as a means of birth control. They warned legislators to think carefully before making the moral environment difficult for young people to live in (Keogh 1996: 166). By this time the status quo on contraceptives was already being seriously eroded. Two private family planning clinics run by the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) were operating in Dublin. Technically they remained within the law by not charging clients a fee for services, but were willing to accept donations. They kept a low profile in case of legal challenge and relied solely on personal and medical networks for referrals. When a large state-funded maternity hospital set up its own family planning advice clinic in 1972, it seemed to many that the government's retention of the legal status quo with regard to contraception was hypocritical and change was long overdue (Solomons 1993: 35).
No one could have known at the time that constitutional history was about to take a dramatic turn. Mrs McGee, a twenty-nine year old mother of four had been advised by her doctors not to have any more children due to the high risks to her health. All of her pregnancies had been complicated by high blood pressure and during one pregnancy she had experienced temporary paralysis. In line with this advice she ordered a packet of spermicide by mail order from England, but the package was confiscated by customs officers. The IFPA encouraged her to take legal action against the state on the grounds that the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935), which prohibited the importation of contraceptives, contravened the section of the 1937 Constitution which respected the rights of the individual citizen. The High Court dismissed the case, but undeterred, Mrs McGee appealed to the Supreme Court and in November 1973 it reversed the lower court's decision by a majority of four votes to one. The ruling was clearly only concerned with the right to marital privacy and contraception within marriage (Jackson 1993: 133). Nevertheless, to the more conservative groups within society it pointed to the possibility of the courts further liberalising the laws on contraceptives in the future and they took action to ensure that this would not happen. John O'Reilly, a member of a conservative Catholic organisation, the Irish Family League, immediately filed a complaint against the IFPA on the grounds that it offered, advertised and sold contraceptives and that it distributed a book containing family planning advice. The IFPA was fined and its booklet banned on the grounds that it was 'indecent and obscene'. The members of the IFPA were more than surprised as the booklet had been in print since 1971 and was in its second edition. The ban was lifted after an appeal by IFPA and a later attempt by the Attorney General to have that decision reversed met with failure (Solomons 1993: 41).
The conservative and liberal elements in Irish society mobilised themselves politically to lobby the government on the contraceptive laws. The conservative groups consisted mainly of a variety of lay Catholic organisations such as The Knights of Columbanus and the Irish Family League. A liberal coalition of feminists and women from the women's section of the Labour Party set up the Contraception Action Programme with the help of the IFPA. They were later joined by members of small left-wing political organisations and student and trade union groups. The numbers who supported reform increased daily. The government could no longer ignore the issue and in December 1978 the Health Minister introduced The Health (Family Planning Bill). The proposed legislation restricted the availability of contraceptives to a prescription when a doctor was satisfied that they were sought bona-fide for the purposes of family planning or for adequate medical reasons. Chemists who objected on ethical grounds to stocking contraceptives would not be obliged to do so, and only chemists and licensed wholesalers could legally advertise and import contraceptives (Galligan 1998a: 150). The clergy stated emphatically that the passing of the Bill could not and would not alter the morality of contraception. The Church's position was that contraceptive intercourse by married couples was contrary to God's design for the transmission of life. They warned that the powerful multi-national contraceptive industry had enormous amounts of money at its disposal to pressure young people to use contraceptives and some advertising was focused explicitly on the young, even those in their early teens. Many of the clergy's concerns were echoed in parliamentary debates by opponents of the legislation. Nevertheless, the Bill became law and in 1985 the law on contraceptives was liberalised further. For some women the battle over reproductive rights was now over, but others were prepared to tackle the more divisive issue of abortion, believing that until it was legalised women were not free from patriarchal domination and did not have full control over their own bodies.
Abortion is illegal in Ireland under the 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act, but according to official statistics 5,642 women from both the north and south of Ireland travel to Britain for abortions every year. A Woman's Right to Choose Group was formed in 1980 advocating the demand for abortion within the context of fertility control in general. It set up the Irish Pregnancy Counselling Centre that included an abortion referral service (Mahon 1995: 687). The more traditional and conservative members of society saw this as an attack on the Catholic ethos and traditional Irish family values. Their main fear of was that abortion could possibly be introduced into Ireland through a decision of the Supreme Court as had happened in the United States in the Roe v Wade case or the enactment of legislation consequent upon Ireland’s membership of the European Community. As in decades past the threat to Irish moral standards was coming from beyond its own shores and in order to head off such a threat lay Catholic groups persuaded the government to insert an amendment into the Constitution to protect the right of the unborn child. The debates that followed were the most contentious and divisive in the history of the state. No politician was willing to take a pro-abortion stance in parliament as the only one to advocate abortion rights was publicly vilified and the campaign against him led to his defeat in the general election of 1981 (Girvin 1994: 203). However, a variety of women's groups campaigned vigorously against the amendment and they were joined by the Protestant Churches, some politicians, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and academic and professional people. Not all these groups were sympathetic to a feminist view on abortion. Many of them took the trouble to advertise their anti-abortion stance, but the one factor uniting such disparate groups was their opposition to inserting the Catholic Church's teaching on abortion into the Constitution (Beale 1986: 15). In a referendum in 1983 sixty-seven percent of the voting public voted against legalising abortion and supported the amendment. The pro-life groups had won and in 1986 they were successful in a legal action to close down counselling clinics offering advice on birth control (Smyth 1993; O'Reilly 1988).
However, the matter did not end there. In 1992 the High Court brought down an injunction preventing a 14-year-old rape victim from travelling abroad for an abortion. The decision was highly criticised and there were mass public demonstrations against it. The government then paid for the girl’s parents to take the case to the Supreme Court. The court ruled that, in this particular case, the girl had a right to travel, but that there was no absolute right in law for a woman to travel if such travel was for the purpose of procuring an abortion. It ruled that abortion was legal in Ireland in the event of there being a real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of the mother, as in the case of a threatened suicide. The Constitutional equal right to life of the mother and foetus was superseded by the superior right to life for the pregnant woman under certain, but limited, circumstances. This ruling did not suit either of the opposing sides. The pro-choice lobby criticised the ruling on the grounds that it was too restrictive and the pro-life lobby called for a new referendum that would protect what they saw as the original intent of the 1983 Eight Amendment to the Constitution, that is an absolute ban on abortion in Ireland (Girvin 1994; Smyth 1993).
The matter was further complicated because Ireland was due to ratify the Maastricht Treaty by referendum shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision. Under pressure from the anti-abortion lobby the government negotiated a special protocol whereby Article 40.3.3 of the Irish Constitution could not be changed by European Community law. Despite the ambiguity of the wording of the protocol the bishops offered broad support for the Maastricht Treaty. Confirming their anti-abortion stance, the Catholic Bishops Conference issued a statement in which they condemned abortion as the "deliberate and direct destruction of unborn human life". However, Catholics were advised that they were free to vote according to their consciences (Nic Ghiolla Phádraig 1995: 611).
As has been demonstrated above, while Ireland remained a traditional, rural society the Roman Catholic Church was allowed to exercise enormous influence on government policy making in relation to marriage, the family, and employment in the decades after independence. Its strategy of linking patriotism and morality ensured the passage of censorship laws that effectively blocked out any competitive ideology that threatened that of Catholic nationalism and its vision of idealised motherhood, still promoted by the present pope. The conservative politicians who responded to placate the hierarchy in relation to contraceptive and employment legislation seemed not to object that these laws impacted negatively on the poorest women in Irish society, a group whose welfare the government and the Church could be expected to be most concerned about. The confrontational nature of the long struggle over reproductive rights and divorce demonstrated clearly the reluctance of conservative and traditionalist legislators to oppose church teaching in favour of women's rights. For their part women were quick to welcome those aspects of modernisation that allowed them social, political and economic freedom unfettered by patriarchal control. However, women need to remain vigilant as there is still a bias towards traditionalism in Irish voting patterns that strongly suggests that the clash between traditionalism and modernity is not altogether played out in Ireland.
The prohibition against divorce had been inserted into the Constitution after strong representation from the Church's representative, Dr. McQuaid (Keogh 1996: 124). From the 1970s the number of marriage breakdowns began to increase as people were more willing than formerly to publicly declare failure in their marital relationships and, in many cases, couples lived openly in de-facto relationships in defiance of church and tradition. The Church remained steadfastly opposed to divorce, although the grounds for marriage annulment had been extended. Although official Church teaching makes it clear that annulment and divorce are not the same thing, for many people, even those sympathetic to the church's position, there appeared to be little difference in some cases between the grounds for an annulment and grounds for a divorce. In 1986 the question of changing the Constitution to allow for divorce was put to a referendum. Statements from the hierarchy prior to the referendum, including messages from the Pope and Mother Teresa, were highly critical of divorce and its effects on families (Adshead 1996: 140). Many of the same coalition groups of lay people who opposed the abortion referendum also opposed the introduction of divorce. The country rejected the first referendum in 1986 but by the time the matter was put to a second referendum in 1995, there was a shift of 13.5% across the country and the referendum was passed by the narrowest of margins ever recorded in the history of the state. The narrow margin was put down to the huge differences on the subject between the attitudes of the urban and rural Irish (Girvin 1996).
Adshead, Maura. 1996. "Sea Change on the Isle of Saints and Scholars? The 1995 Irish Referendum on the Introduction of Divorce." Electoral Studies. Vol.15, No.1, 148-142
Beale, Jenny. 1986. Women in Ireland: Voices of Change. London: Macmillan Education Ltd.
Beaumont, Caitriona. 1997. "Women, Citizenship and Catholicism in the Irish Free State, 1922-1948". Women's History Review. Volume 6, No.4, 564-585.
Busteed, M.A. 1990. Voting Behaviour in the Republic of Ireland. A Geographical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Camp, Richard. 1990. "From Passive Subordination to Complementary Partnership: The Papal Conception Of A Woman's Place in Church and Society Since 1878". American Historical Review. Vol.76, 506-525.
Carlson, J. 1990. Banned in Ireland: Censorship and the Irish Experience. London: Routledge.
Chubb, Basil. 1991. The Politics of the Irish Constitution. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration.
Clear, Caitriona. 1995. "'The Woman Can Not Be Blamed': The Commission on Vocational Organisation, Feminism and 'Home-Makers' in Independent Ireland in the 1930s and '40s." in Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women's Status in Church, State and Society. Edited by Mary O'Dowd & Sabine Wichert. The Queen's University of Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies.
Connolly, Linda. 1996. "The Women's Movement in Ireland, 1970-1995. A Social Movements Analysis". Irish Journal of Feminist Studies. 1:1 Spring, 43-77.
Conroy Jackson, Pauline. 1993. "Managing the mothers: the case of Ireland" in Women and Social Politics in Europe: Work, Family and the State. Edited by Jane Lewis. Aldershot: Elgar.
Daly, Mary E. 1995. "Women in the Irish Free State, 1922-39: The Interaction Between Economics and Ideology". Journal of Women's History. Winter/Spring, 99-116.
Galligan, Yvonne. 1998. "The changing role of women" in Ireland and the Politics of Change. Edited by William Crotty and David E. Schmitt. London: Longman.
Galligan, Yvonne. 1998a. Women and Politics in Contemporary Ireland. From the Margins to the Mainstream. London and Washington: Pinter.
Girvin, Brian. 1996. "Church, State and the Irish Constitution: The Secularisation of Irish Politics?" Parliamentary Affairs. 599-615.
Girvin, Brian. 1994. "Moral Politics and the Irish Abortion Referendums, 1992". Parliamentary Affairs. Vol.47, 203-21.
Hogan, G.W. 1987. "Law and Religion: Church-State Relations in Ireland From Independence to the Present Day". American Journal of Comparative Law. Vol.35, 47-96.
Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books.
Jackson, Nuala. 1993. "Family Law: Fertility and Parenthood" in Gender and the Law in Ireland. Edited by Alpha Connelly. Dublin: Oak Tree Press.
Kelly, Mary. 1993."Censorship and the Media" in Gender and the Law in Ireland. Edited by Alpha Connelly. Dublin: Oak Tree Press.
Kenny, Mary. 1997. Goodbye to Catholic Ireland. A social, personal and cultural history from the fall of Parnell to the realm of Mary Robinson. London: Sinclar-Stevenson.
Keogh, Dermot. 1996. "The Role of the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland 1922-1995" in Building Trust in Ireland. Studies Commissioned by the Forum For Peace and Reconciliation. Belfast: Blackstaff Press.
Keogh, Dermot. 1995. Ireland and the Vatican. The Politics and Diplomacy of Church-State Relations, 1922-1960. Cork: Cork University Press.
Kiberd, Declan. 1996. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Vintage.
Larkin, E. 1975. "The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-1875". In Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism. New York: Arno.
Leonard, Richard. 1995. Beloved Daughters: 100 Years of Papal Teaching on Women. Melbourne: David Lovell Publishing.
Meaney, Gerardine. 1993. "Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics". In Irish Women's Studies Reader. Edited by Ailbhe Smyth. Dublin: Attic Press.
MacWilliams, Monica. 1993. "The Church, the State and the Women's Movement in Northern Ireland" in Irish Women's Studies Reader. Edited by Ailbhe Smyth. Dublin: Attic Press.
Mahon, Evelyn. 1995. "From Democracy to Femocracy: The Women's movement in the Republic of Ireland". In Irish Society. Sociological Perspectives. Edited by Patrick Clancy, Sheelagh Drudy, Kathleen Lynch, and Liam O'Dowd. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration in association with The Sociological Association of Ireland.
Mahon, Evelyn. 1994. "Ireland, a Private Patriarchy?" Environment and Planning. Vol.26, 1277-1246.
Nandy, A. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nic Ghiolla Phádraig, Máire. 1995. "The Power of the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland". In Irish Society. Sociological Perspectives. Edited by Patrick Clancy, Sheelagh Drudy, Kathleen Lynch and Liam O'Dowd. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration in association with The Sociological Association of Ireland.
O'Connor, Pat. 1998. Emerging Voices. Women in Contemporary Irish Society. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration.
O'Dowd, Liam. 1987. "Church, State and Women: The Aftermath of Partition" in Gender in Irish Society, Edited by Chris Curtin, Pauline Jackson, and Barbara O'Connor. Galway: Galway University Press.
Ostner, Illona and Jane Lewis. 1995. "Gender and the Evolution of European Social Policies" in European Social Policy. Between Fragmentation and Integration. Edited by Leibfried, Stephan and Paul Pierson. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution.
O'Reilly, Emily. 1988. Masterminds of the Right. Dublin: Attic Press.
Paul, Camille. 1999. Equal or Different? Women, the Papacy and Social Justice. Mulgrave Victoria: John Garratt Publishing.
Paul VI. 1977. Encyclical Humanae Vitae. Homebush NSW: St. Paul.
Pyle, Jean Larson. 1990. The State and Women in the Economy. Lessons from Sex Discrimination in the Republic of Ireland. Albany: State University of New York.
Randall, Vicky. 1986. "The politics of abortion in Ireland" in The New Politics of Abortion. Edited by Joni Lovenduski and Joyce Outshoorn. London: Sage.
Riley, Maria. 1989. Transforming Feminism. Washington DC: Sheed & Ward.
Riley, Maria. 1991. "Reception of Catholic Social Teaching among Christian Feminists". In Rerum Novarum. A Hundred Years of Catholic Social Teaching. Edited by John Coleman and Gregory Baum. London: SCM Press.
Robinson, Mary, T.W. 1979. "Women and the New Irish State" in Women in Irish Society. The Historical Dimension. Edited by Margaret MacCurtain and Donncha Ó Corráin. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
Ryan, Louise. 1998. "Negotiating Modernity and Tradition: newspaper debates on the 'modern girl' in the Irish Free State'. Journal of Gender Studies. Vol.7, No.2, 181-197.
Scannel, Yvonne, 1988, "The Constitution and the Role of Women" in De Valera's Constitution and Ours. Edited by Brian Farrell. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.
Smyth, Ailbhe. 1993. "The Women's Movement in the Republic of Ireland 1970-1990" in Irish Women's Studies Reader. Dublin: Attic Press.
Solomons, Michael. 1992. Pro Life? The Irish Question. Dublin: The Lilliput Press.
Tavard, George H. 1973. Woman in Christian Tradition. London: University of Notre Dame Press.
Travers, Pauric. 1995. "'There was nothing for me there': Irish female emigration, 1922-71." In Irish Women and Irish Migration. Edited by Patrick O'Sullivan. London: Leicester University Press.
Valiulis, Maryann. 1995. "Neither Feminist nor Flapper: The Ecclesiastical Construction of the Ideal Irish Woman." in Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women's Status in Church, State and Society. Edited by Mary O'Dowd & Sabine Wichert. The Queen's University of Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies.
Whyte, J.H. 1980. Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923-1979. 2nd Edition. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan