John Boyne
People can turn away from the hostilities of the past and decide to live with respect for each other
Iwas in my third year of university in Dublin when homosexuality was finally decriminalised in Ireland. Looking back, it’s astonishing that it took until 1993 for this landmark event to take place but perhaps it’s even more surprising that we would go on to become the first country in the world to vote for Equal Rights Marriage by public plebiscite when a referendum to that effect was passed in 2015.
From a historical standpoint, 22 years is the blink of an eye, so what happened during that time to make these changes in Irish society possible?
In my view, the revelations of child abuse across the Catholic Church were the harbinger of all the societal transformations that would come. For so long, families had been afraid to report errant priests to the civil authorities, choosing to voice their complaints to ecclesiastical powers who felt no compunction about moving criminals from parish to parish where they could continue their abusive behaviour rather than allow anything to be made public that might damage the church’s reputation.
However, when the first victims of clerical rape began reporting these crimes to the police and were finally taken seriously, the views of Irish people underwent a generational shift.
Those under 40 grew determined to throw off the old ways and usher in the new. For so long, the bishops had controlled both the government and the people and it was as if, after two decades of court cases, we rose up as a populace and cried no more.
In time, we would look for ways to punish them at the ballot box and we found it, both in the Equal Rights Marriage Act and in last year’s repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which meant that women could now legally have abortions without having to travel to England.
For decades, many people left Ireland, a country with a dark history of emigration from famine times to the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, because they found it impossible to live their authentic lives in their own country. But the transformation of society has seen to it that this is no longer among the reasons for leaving. Even our Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Leo Varadkar, is gay, living happily with his partner and no one cares in the slightest.
It took me a long time to write about Ireland and I explored it in two novels, A History of Loneliness and The Heart’s Invisible Furies. The former tackled the Church; the latter explored the difficulties facing a gay man for the 70 years from the end of World War II until the passing of the Equal Rights Marriage Act.
The strange thing was, that even though I was writing about difficult issues, I came to value and love my country even more as I wrote these
books. I think it’s an amazing thing that a people can turn away from the hostilities of the past and decide to live with respect for each other.
Of course, for a novelist, this has all proved a bit problematic. If we can’t complain about all the wrongs in our own country, then what are we supposed to write about? We have to find new pre-occupations.
There are the banks, of course; they’re always good for a bit of criticism. And the state of the roads. Ryanair rage is a well-known medical condition, as is Brexit boredom. The truth is, young people and the forces of liberalism have destroyed all the favourite preoccupations of novelists.
I knew no good would come from any of this.
If we can’t complain about all the wrongs in our own country, then what are we supposed to write about? John Boyne