Irish vote signals an end to the bad old days
The plane home from Cork was full of young women, several with ‘‘Repeal’’ badges or T-shirts. The Irish ‘‘home to vote’’ movement drew them across the world to put an end to the Eighth Amendment of their constitution, and to enable a law permitting termination of pregnancy up to 12 weeks, later in certain cases. It was carried by nearly two-thirds, as solid in rural areas as cities.
The campaigners’ rejoicing may seem odd with a topic so painful: nobody likes the idea of abortion or hopes to need one. But when the need is real it is a crucial part of healthcare. The 1983 amendment removed from doctors – on pain of 14 years’ prison – even their previous limited ability to weigh a woman’s survival against that of her foetus. Even if scans proved it could not live. Raped children, incest victims and girls with learning disabilities had to carry to term. The death of Savita Halappanavar brought national anger when – miscarrying her first baby – she was refused proper treatment because there was still a foetal heartbeat.
Hundreds marched in her name, and tens of thousands have travelled to England for treatment over the years. Sometimes with real and urgent fears for their health, sometimes for ‘‘social’’ terminations: too young, too poor or traumatised by abuse. Alarm met reports that NHS shortages at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital may mean limiting Irish patients with fatal foetal abnormalities: these are women who refer themselves after the awful diagnosis because their Irish doctors may not. Imagine that sad ferry journey.
So, though you may shiver, understand the rejoicing. Many ‘‘Yes’’ voters will actually be people who would never do it themselves, but who simply and sanely affirm other people’s right to privacy and conscience.
It was a village event that returned us to West Cork last week, but it coincidentally fed a wider awareness of what the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar robustly called Ireland’s ‘‘legacy of shame’’. A wider reflection, too, on the ancient perils of theocracy. At the Fastnet Film Festival in Schull every hall and most bars run 200 submitted films on screens and walls. It’s international, but always includes sharp or witty looks at Ireland itself. One by Mia Mullarkey struck home. Its spur was the exposure of the mass grave in Tuam, in Galway: as many as 796 illegitimate babies and children who died under the care of Bon Secours nuns were buried in a disused septic tank, right up to the 1960s.
In the film elderly survivors quietly remembered harshness, nakedness, starvation and slave labour on local farms. One explained how ‘‘fallen’’ girls were captured: the priest came to a family’s door saying that he knew the daughter’s state and to avoid scandal in the parish he would make an arrangement. With the nuns.
That film, together with the now well-known story of the Magdalene laundries and other ‘‘homes’’, resonated strongly. For Varadkar’s words about a legacy of shame go beyond the referendum, to centuries of clerical domination in the name of ‘‘Holy Ireland’’ as a moral beacon to the world.
Piquantly, the gala event of the festival was another take on the shame of illegitimacy: a 1925 film of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, with a live score composed and conducted by Carl Davis. Note that the Irishman Wilde had by 1892 already skewered the hypocrisy of stigmatising females while letting men off the hook. But the ambition to be a holy beacon died hard.
No state should try that game. Theocratic moral missions always turn nasty. Especially to women, because that’s the lazy way. Never mind all the other crimes and injustices, just keep the women ‘‘pure’’. Pretend it is not because they are weaker, and in childbearing years more vulnerable, but because they are so precious.
Again and again you meet this tendency: whether it’s the old German approval of ‘‘Kinder, Kuche, Kirche’’, the Saudi ban on women drivers, or the rigours of other Islamic ‘‘guardianship’’ and veiling. In Ireland, itself too long crushed under a foreign Protestant yoke, Catholicism curdled defiantly into male clerical abuse and angry, thwarted nunly viciousness towards ‘‘fallen women’’. Contraception was not fully legal till the 1990s; girls of ‘‘tainted’’ virtue were still being interned as that decade began.
However, theocrats from Kabul to Kilkenny should know that they are not only irrational and cruelly wasting human potential, but shooting themselves in the foot. Resistance – whether to the burka, forced marriage or the sexual policing of women – will always come. And it will make people hostile to religion itself, rejecting its best nourishment and spirituality. Once clerical authority reaches for the cudgel of compulsion, it demeans itself and rots its own core. It’s a nonsense.
We did it spectacularly five centuries ago, when within 30 years you could first be martyred for being a Catholic (hence, a traitor) then under Bloody Mary for being a Protestant (ditto), then again for being a Catholic. Joanna Carrick’s fine new play Put Out the Lights completes a trilogy about ordinary humble lives during this Tudor switchback: the heroine Alice Driver was a farm woman burnt in Ipswich in 1558 for Protestantism. But moving as such stories are, what stays in the mind is the absurdity. Unprovable but beautiful soul-deep beliefs are twisted into clumsy oppression. Let all the world grow out of that, as Ireland bravely has. – The Times