Society

TEN YEARS AGO, even in Dublin's rather ratsy version of Bohemia, it wasn't really acceptable to 'sleep around' (that strange euphemism) parrticularly if you were a woman, That's all changed. Virginity, our most previous gift so the nuns told us, is now disspensed with as soon as posssible. As Cass, a nineteen year old, explained: "Like I was quite old really, I was sixteen and I knew all about draw and dope and acid and stuff, but I'd never had sex. All my friends had done it and I felt really naive".

MACROOM, a sleepy Munster town, twenty four miles west of Cork, is an unlikely candidate as the Irish Wooddstock, but that is what it has become as the serene grounds of Macroom Castle are now the established venue for the country's greatest annual open-air rock concert.

"Joseph and The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat" has already bought Noel Pearson a small castle in Killiney and may yet rescue him from the depredations of "Elvis" and "Plain Porter." More appropriately the show should now be known as "Joseph and The Amazing Bank of Ireland Chequebook."

1913 was the year of the heroic uprising by the Dublin prolateriat. A new book, "Divided City" prepared by the Curriculum Development Unit of the VEC, chronicles the struggle, and here, with the permission of the publishers, O'Brien Press, we publish a precis of the text and some of the book's most, outstanding photographs.

Short extracts from Wigmore, edited by Vincent Browne.

Sexual attitudes and behaviour are changing radically in Ireland as evidenced by the increasing breakdown of marriages, the higher VD and illegitimacy rates and the sale of the contraceptive pill. We examine the scale of this change and attempt to describe current attitudes to sex in Irish society.  

LAST MONTH'S Seachtain na Gaeilge was probably one of the most successful series of events organised by Connradh na Gaeilge in Dublin over the past half-century ðyet its impact on the capital city was negligible. A sad reflection on the mass moveement founded by Dr. Dougglas Hyde more than 80 years ago. 

A new survey on male sexuality shows that men want sex more than once a day, still want to marry virgins, are prone to cheat, prefer sexually active women and react with disbelief on hearing of their wife's infedility.

Janet Martin reports how women suffer strangulation attempts and attacks with razors, knives, broken bottles and clenched fists and how children in Irish homes suffer battering and sexual assaults.

IT IS ALMOST five years now since Dr Dermot Ryan, newly installed as Archbishop of Dublin, decided that housing the homeless would be his primary social concern.