Jack Carrigan Finds a Study of Irish Attitudes Towards Sexuality Deeply Depressing
By Diarmaid Ferriter
Catholic Herald (United Kingdom)
October 2, 2009
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/reviews/r0000523.shtml
The title of this book has a certain ironic potency of its own, for "occasions of sin" were what, in childhood, we Catholics have always been taught to avoid. The author, professor of Modern Irish History at University College, Dublin, is tongue-in-cheek in this allusion; his book, over 600 pages and sub-titled, "Sex and society in modern Ireland", is actually a scholarly and sober survey of all the different areas that the subtitle conveys: contraception, child abuse, abortion, infanticide, illegitimacy, prostitution and homosexuality. The question he ponders throughout is: has Ireland been different from other western countries concerning its attitudes and legislation about sexual matters, and if so, in what ways? It is, as he acknowledges throughout, a complex subject.
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| Marchers gather in Dublin for the annual Gay Pride parade |
Ferriter makes his book manageable by dividing it into discrete periods: 1845-1922; 1922-1940; 1940-1960; 1960-1970; and 1970-2005. In the earliest period it is not surprising to learn that the Famine and subsequent land legislation had a hugely negative effect on society: before the Famine about 10 per cent of Irish 50-year-olds were unmarried; this had steadily increased to 25 per cent before World War I. Indeed, in 1907 the marriage rate stood at 4.8 per cent per 1,000 - 40 per cent below that of England and Wales, and 35 per cent below Scotland. Official statistics indicate four salient features: a low marriage rate, high fertility, emigration and celibacy. The court records have their own doleful witness; these pathetic transcripts of interviews with young people form a substantial part of the author's source material throughout and suggest a disturbingly high rate of sexual abuse and exploitation of children - often incest, associated with severe poverty.
In 1926 he cites two significant statistics: 78,934 people - a quarter of Dublin's population - were housed in one-room tenements; and 72 per cent of Irish men and 53 per cent of women, between the ages of 25 and 43 were unmarried. Again, alongside a strict public moral and religious code and extensive celibacy the court records cite not infrequent cases of rape and infanticide, the latter because of the fear of illegitimacy.
There has been much recent media condemnation of the Magdalen Homes for unmarried mothers, a particularly Irish response to pregnancy outside marriage. Ferriter tries hard to be even-handed. He recognises that Britain took a similarly punitive attitude, at least until the 1960s, and mentions the positive work the Legion of Mary undertook with prostitutes and pregnant girls. For instance Frank Duff, founder of the Legion, was very opposed to the dreary industrial schools whose poor or orphaned girls often later turned to prostitution. Ferriter points out that the Sancta Maria Rescue Society was the only organisation in the whole country which arranged treatment, medical help and after-care for women suffering from venereal diseases.
Interestingly, the author also comments that it was the Legion which was alive to the loneliness and isolation of the homosexual population at a time when the subject was officially taboo.
The latter part of the book is, inevitably, concerned with the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), established in 2000 which reported its findings this year. These findings corroborate the author's own wider research and his conclusions: that many young people had no rights recognised and were failed by the very authorities that should have been caring for them. He quotes Brother John O'Shea, the regional leader of the Brothers of Charity, who in 2004 referred to "an authoritarian atmosphere in schools and institutions which made even credible people afraid to complain".
Ferriter describes CICA as a "harrowing 3,000-page monument to victims of abuse"; thousands of children suffered systematic physical and sexual abuse between the Thirties and the Seventies and lived in a climate of fear in residential institutions funded by the state but run by religious orders.
The Christian Brothers, who looked after 650,000 children in their institutions between 1930 and 1995, are especially condemned.
The abuse ran alongside a feature that the author notes throughout his book: the "public image" of the Irish as more chaste, pious and respectable than people elsewhere (especially the ungodly English), where souls rather than bodies were the preoccupation and where hypocrisy thrived alongside secrecy and shame.
Analysing the role of the clerics working in the infamous industrial schools, he describes a "uniquely Irish mixture of large families, thwarted ambitions, rigorous segregation of the sexes and lack of economic opportunity" which drew many wholly unsuitable men into such work.
By the Seventies the Jansenist features of Irish society and the Church in particular, were slowly on the wane, though there was still an obsession with "avoiding scandal" rather than acceptance of moral responsibility - a "not in Ireland" mentality.
Ferriter again asks whether the scale and practice of child abuse was unique, given the absence of detailed comparative analysis and statistics. He acknowledges that other countries, notably America, also suffered this phenomenon.
As well as the obvious sources for his research, the author draws on novels, films, newspaper articles and television and examines the influence of individuals such as the formidable John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin from 1940-72. He quotes Mary Kenny, prominent in the women's movement in the Seventies, who wrote in 2003: "Liberation was not as easy as it looked. Lifestyle choices all brought their own sorrows."
The impression I am finally left with after reading the painstaking evidence brought together in these pages is that it has taken a long time for Ireland to emerge from a poor, rural, depressed and repressed society, where deep and genuine piety and good works coexisted alongside a darker seam of violence, bigotry and hypocrisy and where there was often a collusion of silence among social workers, doctors, priests, teachers and neighbours. If the book was not an occasion of sin it was certainly an occasion of gloom.
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