ANNE GILDEA

Anne, 52, is one-third of comedy trio The Nualas. They play the Everyman Palace in Cork on Saturday, April 21. She says: I GREW up on a farm in Sligo so from when I was very young I saw calves being born, and I knew where life came from. The funny thing about it was I used to watch the AI man inseminating the cow; it is very startling watching an AI man inseminating a cow. When I was about 10, my brother — who was always a reader — had read something and come up with this idea that parents have a baby by rubbing their bare bottoms together. He told me and my sister Una and we were shocked.

I remember you would always see on American TV programmes the big chat about the birds and the bees. I had an idea about the whole thing but it was very vague.

I remember saying to my Mum that I felt I was being shortchanged not getting the full sit-down. She said, ‘Well you see the cattle, there’s only one in and out and that’s it. No, we won’t go into it.’ Certainly there was never any mention of love.

A friend of a friend was telling me that her sister was telling her two children how babies were made and they were totally shocked. One of them says, ‘And you did that twice?!’

I’m 52 now and growing up in rural Sligo it was in my head until I was at least 16 or 17 that it was an absolutely mortal sin to have sex outside marriage. It was so shocking. Now we have a situation where the average age of a child accessing porn is 11. There’s a whole generation of boys who have pornographic expectations about how to sexually relate.

I’m not a parent but I feel for parents, I really do. I think they could tell their children that pornographic sex is not the way adults normally relate sexually. That’s a big thing because of misogynist pornography and that sort of pornographic attitude towards women that came out in the WhatsApp messages in the Belfast rape trial. It’s a brilliant moment for people who are at that age to just think and talk about it.