The Vicky Phelan case underlines an uncomfortable truth: this country treats women appallingly

VICKY Phelan probably had no idea what she was starting. When she took her court case against the laboratory in Texas that missed the vital warnings of her cervical cancer, there were attempts at every turn to make her sign a non-disclosure agreement – that’s the polite legalese for a gagging clause – to ensure she would keep quiet and go away.

By speaking out, she has sent a seismic shock through the most powerful institutions in the land – government, the health service, and the legal system. Her voice, calm, controlled, ripe with quiet fury and, as a consequence, a weapon of enormous power, has unfalteringly turned the spotlight onto an aspect of Irish life we prefer to pretend simply does not exist.

And, unvarnished, it is this. We just don’t treat women very well, and never have done.

Ludicrous

The list of horrors is endless, and deeply shameful. There was Dr Noël Browne’s Mother and Child Scheme, shut down by the edict of a bishop because it would have allowed women to choose their own doctors, and those doctors might have held an ethos that did not entirely mirror Catholic Church teaching.

We had the ludicrous domicile law, which determined that a woman lived where her husband did. So if a man went to the UK and secured a divorce, which was recognised here, his wife, who had not consented to it, was legally deemed also to be living in the UK, even though she might have been left abandoned with eight children in Drimnagh. When, in the Sixties, the contraceptive pill gave women across the world control of their fertility for the first time, and saved them the misery of almost endless pregnancy throughout their childbearing years – and, all too often, death – it remained banned here for another generation, unless they could convince a doctor to prescribe it for menstrual irregularity.

When single women got pregnant and had babies, they were locked up in mother-and-baby homes and in Magdalene laundries, in many cases serving life sentences for the crime of exploring their sexuality, even though the teenage boys and men in the equation faced no sanction at all. They were the Adams, always superior to the Eves.

Women working in the Civil Service or in banking institutions had to give up work the day they got married, forced to subdue their talent and intellect and sit at home all day whether they wanted to or not. Who knows what contributions to business and civic life were lost by this enforced stifling of other voices, voices that actually night have been more prudent and wise than those of the men who replaced them?

It didn’t end there. If a couple had a joint passport, the man was allowed to travel on it alone, but not the woman. If a woman was working and sought a bank loan, it had to be underwritten by her husband, even if he was unemployed. A man was entitled to the dole at 18, a woman was not. They was no automatic right to a half-share in the family home, and no barring orders to prevent a violent husband or partner from visiting it whenever he wanted to take out his rage on a defenceless wife or partner. Men could drink in the bar, but women only in the lounge, and even then only from halfpint glasses.

Hopeless

We had the case of Ann Lovett, a teenager who died after giving birth in a grotto in Granard, even though many people in the town knew she was pregnant and did not intervene. In the Kerry Babies Inquiry, Joanne Hayes was vilified as having loose morals, a judgment never made about her lover, Jeremiah Locke.

We were and are hopeless at providing affordable childcare, even if things have got marginally better in the past few years. For most women, having a second child means that working no longer makes any sense, as an entire salary would go on the cost of a creche.

Above all, though, we have treated women abominably when it comes to healthcare, and reproductive healthcare in particular. We need look no further than the agony of non-consensual symphysiotomy, in which the forcible widening of the pelvis during difficult births led to a lifetime of pain, incontinence and early-onset osteoporosis for 1,500 women. There were multiple cases of unnecessary hysterectomies in Our Lady of Lourdes hospital in Drogheda, 129 of them carried out by Dr Michael Neary, when the average surgeon would expect to perform five or six in an entire career – and no one seemed to notice.

In care, we saw the abuse of ‘Grace’ and, more recently, of Rachel Barry, who bravely waived her anonymity and told how, after she informed fostering services she had been raped, her abuser was left in situ with two other girls he also sexually assaulted.

Justice

And, when justice needs to be served, it is women, warrior women, who have to secure it for themselves or for their children. Women such as Kathy Sinnott, who went to the High Court to ensure her intellectually disabled son had the same right to education as every other child; Christine Buckley, who revealed the scandal of life in the Goldenbridge orphanage; the Magdalene survivors and their long fight for justice and reparation; Catherine Corless, who doggedly investigated the Tuam babies and their ignominious fate; Susie Long, who developed terminal bowel cancer after a seven-month wait for a colonoscopy and changed the system after telling her story on Liveline; Philomena Lee, whose heart-rending tale of the enforced adoption that separated her from her son put powerful physical form on an amorphous scandal; and now Vicky Phelan, whose appearance last Saturday on The Ray D’Arcy Show left the entire country punching the air at her wondrous advocacy for all women (I stood up from the couch and applauded, something I can’t remember ever doing before), while simultaneously wiping the tears streaming down their cheeks.

As a man, all of this leaves me seething with rage, so I can’t imagine how it felt for my mother, my sisters, my female friends, and women I never will meet or know.

This country is overloaded with women whose contribution to public life could be enormous, but they still are under-represented, not least because childcare remains a burden inequitably placed predominantly on their shoulders.

We did not need the past ten days to illustrate just how badly women have been failed in Ireland, by powerful institutions lined up to keep them down. Maybe we actually did need a reminder, though, as even the Taoiseach acknowledged this week. (Though speaking of taoisigh, isn’t it worth noting that we’re one of the only countries in Europe never to have had a woman as the elected head of government? They’ve held high-profile roles including Tánaiste and President, but never the top job, where true power lies. In truth, we’ve never come close. A gay man, yes; a separated man, yes; but a woman? Come off it!)

And so what Leo Varadkar’s words reminded us of is this: we cannot leave it to women to ensure they are treated with genuine equality. For that to happen, the men who love them must step up to the plate too. Unless we all are equal, then by definition, no one is.