No country for young women

After a tumultuous week that saw Ireland's economic sovereignty receding before our very eyes, Joseph Mahon reviews a new book about the foundations of the Irish state.

As the centenary of 1916 fast approaches, it is timely to reconsider the 1916 Proclamation - both as one of the foundation documents of the Irish state, and as a set of proposals for the good society.

For the leaders of 1916, the good society is a republic. They defined a republic as a sovereign state or country, one enjoying self-rule rather than rule from a distant capital; a sovereign state which would claim the allegiance of every male and female citizen; a state which would guarantee religious and civil liberty; one which would provide equal rights and opportunities to all its citizens; one resolved to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all its parts, and one which would cherish all the children of the nation equally. With its emphases on equality and rights, on religious and civil liberties, plus the pursuit of happiness and prosperity, the Proclamation outlined an admirable political programme for the century ahead, one inspired in no small measure by Thomas Paine and the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence in 1776.

So, how have we done when we look back over the past one hundred years or so?

As Gerard O'Neill - founder and chairman of Amarach - sees it in his book 2016: A New Proclamation for A New Generation, we have done spectacularly well.

He reports that Irish people are very proud of their country and their culture; we have governed ourselves as a nation for nearly a hundred years; the Irish remain among the most religiously observant people in Europe; "we Irish live in the most economically free country in Europe and the third freest in the world according to the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom 2009"; we enjoy a higher standard of living "than we have ever had before"; "we are more tolerant than the twenty-seven member countries of the EU [EU27] as a whole"; we have embraced the opportunities presented by membership of the United Nations and the European Union; "Irish levels of home ownership are among the highest in Europe, and well above the EU27 average of 65 percent"; "On most measures, Ireland is one of the most peaceful countries in the world"; "The HDI [Human Development Index] report for 2009 shows Ireland as having the fifth highest HDI score in the world, out of 182 countries covered by the study. Ireland ranks eighteenth on measured life expectancy, tenth on educational measuress and tenth on the standard of living score"; Irish people are among the most satisfied with their lives in the European Union; "In a contemporary international context, income inequality in Ireland is not especially severe. Ireland's Gini co-efficient in 2008 was 33, versus an EU average of 31: similar to that of the Netherlands and Finland."; "the statistical evidence shows a modest but steady decline in income inequality in Ireland as measured by the Central Statistic Office's annual survey of Income and Living Conditions [SILC]"; "The proportion of the total population in primary, secondary and tertiary education combined in Ireland...is the highest in the European Union at 24.6 percent [the EU average is 19.0 percent]"; [that] "In the event that the 2011 Census revealed a Catholic majority in Northern Ireland, then...a few more years of procedural and legislative arranging could see a united Ireland by 2016"; "Irish women received their 'guarantee of equal rights' [equal suffrage] six years before their counterparts in Northern Ireland and Great Britain and many years before the majority of women around the world could vote."; finally, says O'Neill , "it is gratifying to note that Ireland ranks among those nations with the lowest gender gap in the world.

Overall [combining scores from the four categories of educational attainment, political empowerment, economic participation and opportunity, and health and survival], Ireland ranked eighth among 134 countries surveyed in 2009 in terms of having the narrowest gap [Iceland ranked first.] Ireland's ranking has actually improved from tenth place in 2006."

O'Neill's Tir na nOg [Ireland 1921- 2010] doesn't remotely describe the Ireland in which I personally grew up [1948- 1968 ], with corporal punishment endemic in its schools [including the Jesuit secondary-top to which I went], its industrial schools and 'orphanages' [one of each half a mile from where I lived], Magdalen laundries [one in my home town], rural homes without running water, without sanitation [don't ask] or electricity, the boat-train to Euston [Crewe at 3 a.m.], and the blanket ban on most of the great works of Western literature.

Neither does it describe the Ireland of today, with well over 400,000 unemployed, and droves of young adults abandoning the country in despair, 70,000 in serious mortgage default, high levels of elder abuse, and loss of sovereignty to the ECB and the bond markets.

It's as if, then, there are two Irelands: the one you see, and the one you don't; the one you remember, and the one you don't, or won't.

As O'Neill sees it, Ireland has achieved almost everything one would wish it to have achieved.

Just two things remain to be accomplished: a united Ireland and a predominantly male workforce.

A united Ireland, because - to quote from O'Neill's "A Proclamation for 2016" - "It is the firm wish of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people of different traditions on the island of Ireland in a united Ireland, with the consent of a majority in both jurisdictions of the island." A predominantly male workforce is desirable, for unless such a workforce materialises once again, we "might see the emergence in Ireland of a 'she-economy' by 2016, with women accounting for the majority of jobs and a greater share of consumer spending."

Why is this such a fearful, apocalyptic prospect?

Basically, because there would be no one left to look after the children. With large numbers of women out participating in the paid labour force, and the fact - both logical and physical - that "one cannot be both a career woman and a stay at home mother", there would be no one left who was qualified to look after the children.

In the end, then, Gerard O'Neill's 2016: A New Proclamation for a New Generation turns out to be a plea for a return to patriarchy, Irish-style.

But patriarchal Ireland was no country for old women, and even less so for young women. Let me assemble some reminders. The Censorship of Publications Act 1929 provided for the banning of publications on three grounds, the third of which was that they advocated "the unnatural prevention of conception or the procurement of abortion or miscarriage." An amendment to the Criminal Law Act, 1935 made it an offence to import, distribute or sell contraceptives within the jurisdiction. And the intentional procurement of a miscarriage had been a criminal offence since the mid-nineteenth century.

So, what happened?

Well, to begin with, "Women of child-bearing age with no knowledge or access to contraception must now [1945 ] accept the possibility of conception after every sexual experience regardless of their consent. For many sexually active couples who would not practise abstinence this meant enormous families of sometimes over ten children; families of over twenty children were not unknown. Neither were women with health complications spared. Their duty was to put the life of the child they were carrying ahead of their own and thousands would carry their pregnancy to full term knowing it could mean their own death." [R. Kavanagh, Mamie Cadden, Backstreet Abortionist, Mercier Press, 2005, p.110.]

Depending on her marital status, there were seven more or less hazardous alternatives available to a woman who found herself faced with a crisis pregnancy. They were: abortion, abandonment, infanticide, adoption, fostering, emigration and disappearance into a mother and baby home. Kavanagh gives the following illustration of the 'fostering' service:

Even since her early days in Portland Row Mamie had collaborated with Kathleen McLoughlin who lived at 30 Berkeley Road in the Dublin suburb of Phibsborough. McLoughlin, who described herself as a social worker, performed quite a different job to what we would now expect from a social worker.

In an age when the supply of unwanted babies far exceeded the demand for adoptions, McLoughlin, for a fee, would farm out babies to women who would rear them, also for a fee. It was a precursor to the modern system of fostering and was perfectly legal. An unwanted infant would be born in St Maelruin's (perhaps the mother was unmarried or already felt she had as many children as she could cope with) and Nurse Cadden would take responsibility for the child for an 'adoption' fee. Usually the fee was 50 pounds, quite a considerable sum but obviously an amount her clients were only too happy to part with for her services.

Then Nurse Cadden would contact McLoughlin who would place the babies with mothers who often had children of their own and for whom the extra monthly payment handed over by McLoughlin would be a welcome addition to the household income... McLoughlin had been involved in this type of work since 1912.

Mike Milotte's Banished Babies: The secret history of Ireland's baby export business [New Island books, 1997] gives the following account of the mother and baby homes: Entering a mother and baby home run by the Sisters was, more often than not, a last resort for a pregnant woman, a move that was undertaken with great trepidation for these homes had frightening reputations as places of retribution and punishment as much as places of confinement. They most certainly were not places where the bringing forth of new life was celebrated.

The nuns provided secrecy, but they exacted a price. Girls and young women entering these institutions, unless they had independent means, had to 'work their passage' with hard manual labour, scrubbing and cleaning indoors, working the land outdoors. Many women whose children were not fostered or adopted immediately had to work in the convents for as much as two years after their babies were born before the nuns would agree to take charge of their children. Indeed, some of these unfortunate young mothers became so dependent they have remained to this day working in the institutions where their children were born several decades ago.

During the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s there was a thriving abortion service run from premisses in Dublin city centre, and from nursing homes in Rathmines and Ranelagh. The midwives and quacks providing this service variously used a 'sea-tangle tent,' sold in bottles of six at 95 Merrion Square, Ergot, an abortifacient in powder or tablet form, and a large enema-type syringe called a Higginson syringe.

Following a concerted campaign by the courts, the clergy, the press and members of the medical profession, all of the abortion clinics, bar one, had been closed down by 1945. When abortion became unavailable in Ireland, Irish women had to procure their terminations in England, and did so in very large numbers following the liberalisation of its law on abortion in 1967.

Between 1968 and 2008, 153,912 abortions were procured by Irish women in clinics in England and Wales. [Wm. Robert Johnston, Historical abortion statistics, Ireland.] In recent weeks, it has been reported that Irish Customs Officers have been intercepting packages of the abortifacients Mifepristone and Misoprostol purchased over the internet. So it is reasonable to conclude that a form of backstreet abortion is once again appearing in Ireland. But just like previous 20th-century forms of backstreet abortion, this procedure is hazardous.

Yet fearing the legal consequences, women who suffer complications may not seek medical assistance.

To conclude. In patriarchal Ireland, every man and woman knew their place, and for many more there was no place at all. Children were to be seen and not heard - if they knew what was good for them.

It wasn't a republic, it was a gulag. Do we want to go back to all of that?