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International Socialism, Summer 2001

Goretti Horgan

Changing women’s lives in Ireland

From International Socialism 2:91, Summer 2001.
Copyright © International Socialism.
Copied with thanks from the International Socialism Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Until the last few years of the 1990s Ireland had the reputation of being the most sexually repressed country in Europe, where women were second class citizens and the Catholic church ruled virtually unchallenged. But things have changed fast. A national survey in 1973–1974 found that three out of four people thought sex outside marriage was always wrong. A survey in 1997 found that 21 to 24 year olds had, on average, had 13 different sexual partners. [1] In 1990 Dublin’s Virgin Megastore was fined £500 for selling condoms. In 1999 the Dublin government spent £500,000 promoting the use of condoms. [2] While Gordon Brown felt it necessary to get married to enhance his chances of becoming prime minister in Britain, the Irish taoiseach (prime minister), Bertie Ahern, lives openly with his (unmarried) partner who accompanies him on state visits as ‘first lady’.

The point of this article is to argue that these changes have come about not, as media commentators would have it, because of EU-inspired liberalisation nor, as feminists would have it, solely because of ‘the women’s movement’. Rather change has been generated mainly by shifts in patterns of production. In short, it is changes in capitalism that have led to changes in women’s lives, the family and attitudes to sex and sexuality.

Marxists argue that women’s oppression is rooted in our role in the reproduction of the next generation of workers. The way reproduction is organised depends on the way production is organised – women’s oppression can be ended only by overthrowing capitalism and bringing production under workers’ control. [3] The story of Ireland in the last 20 years shows there is nothing abstract about this analysis. It also shows the intervention of socialists can be crucial in ensuring progress.

Despite Ireland being synonymous with sexual repression, there was never anything ‘Irish’ or inevitable about it. The reason women’s rights were so lacking can be traced to changes in the form of the family, and to the way reproduction was organised from the middle of the 19th century.
 

Family and famine

Marriage in Ireland up to 150 years ago was as informal as it is today for many ‘living as married’ couples – the Penal Laws, which Britain had introduced in the mid-17th century making Catholics second class citizens, meant that, while the church was identified with the oppressed, it had little effect on the oppressed’s day to day life. In 1793 the ratio of priests to Catholics was 1 : 1,587. [4] In 1840 it was 1 : 3,023. There were very few church buildings. [5] The church had little influence on family life or on sexual mores generally. This section examines how changes in women’s role in production following the Great Famine led to changes in how reproduction was organised within the family.

Before the famine attitudes to sex remained open, were often earthy, and celebrated women’s sexuality as well as men’s. The Midnight Court, a long poem written in Irish in 1780–1781, described an imagined court of women putting the men of Ireland on trial for being useless in bed. The poem, banned in its English translations until the last decades of the 20th century, gives some insight into attitudes to women’s sexuality. Here an older woman laments the plight of a younger sister, married to an old man with no interest in sex:

The idea of women controlling their fertility was not the taboo subject it was to become. There was a folktale about St Brigid – supposedly a contemporary of St Patrick – who was renowned for her work with fertility in all its forms. Brigid met a young woman distressed because she was pregnant: ‘Brigid prayed, then she blessed the woman, laid hands on her womb, and the foetus miraculously disappeared’. [6]

Until the Great Famine of 1845–1851 the custom in Ireland, among all but the large farmer class, was to divide the land between all the sons in a family as they married. This could be done at any time, so people were able to get married very young. Early marriage meant many children and, from the end of the 17th century, a rapid rise in population. This rise was boosted by the very low rate of infant mortality which, as a result of widespread breastfeeding and the nutritional value of the potato, was below 10 percent – half that in most parts of Europe. [7] So, while the population was around 1.5 million in 1673, it had risen to 3 million by the 1750s and to 4 million by the 1780s. [8] This escalation continued in the early 19th century. By 1821 the population had reached 6,802,000; it rose to 7,767,000 in 1831 and 8,175,000 by 1841. [9]

At this time marriage for the majority was based on love and on the skills which each partner brought to the family – the man provided land and farming skills to grow the staple crop of potatoes, and the woman brought weaving and spinning skills which provided extra money to buy tea, sugar and whatever else was needed by the household. Her input to the agricultural work of the family was also important. Before the famine women made an essential contribution to the family economy. As late as 1841 women accounted for more than half of the non-agricultural workforce. Most of their economic independence was based on spinning wool, cotton and linen. But the growth of factory competition undermined this – between 1841 and 1851 the number of spinners fell by some 75 percent. Only in the Belfast region, where linen became a factory industry, did this work survive the combination of the famine and the industrial revolution. [10]

The famine decimated the rural poor. Almost a million died of starvation, while several million were forced to emigrate. Their tiny plots were taken over by the larger tenant farmers holding 15 acres or more. This large tenant farmer class was – apart from the Anglo-Irish aristocracy – the only class to survive the famine intact, and emerged as by far the strongest class in Catholic Ireland. In 1841 only 18 percent of landholdings in Ireland were of more than 15 acres. By 1851 51 percent of holdings were over 15 acres. By 1891 this had risen to 58 percent. At the same time the total numbers of holdings had fallen from 691,000 in 1841 to 570,000 in 1851 and 517,000 in 1891. [11]

These economic and social changes forced the workers and rural poor of Ireland to drastically alter their form of the family. For a generation before the famine the larger tenant farmer class had shunned subdivision of land and early marriage, as it struggled to achieve primitive accumulation of wealth. It was this which ensured its survival in the famine. [12] In the aftermath it became clear that if a repeat of the ‘Great Calamity’ was to be avoided, the practices of the better-off would have to be adopted by the poorer classes. Thus the custom of dividing the land between all the sons in a family would have to be discontinued and the land passed on to one son only. Further the number of children born to families would have to be limited.

The role of the Catholic church was crucial to these changes in family life. The church was, in effect, the large tenant farmer class at prayer. Most priests came from this layer – Catholics who could afford to educate their children. In the early 19th century the cost of sending a son to Maynooth for the first year was £40 to £50 at a time when the average wage was about a shilling a day. In 1808, of the 205 students in Maynooth seminary, 78 percent were the sons of farmers – and it was only the larger farmers who could afford to send their sons there. [13]

The church provided the ideological basis for the sexual repression which ensured the pattern of late marriages and what came to be called ‘permanent celibacy’ which was to become the norm in Ireland right up to the second half of the 20th century. Changing the sexual mores of centuries would be no easy task under normal circumstances. But the aftermath of a catastrophe which saw the population almost halve, from 8 million in 1841 to 4.5 million in 1861, was not a normal circumstance. Carrying on ‘normal life’ after the famine was impossible.

In this situation the church was able to offer the traditional religious explanations for disaster and, by providing spiritual consolation to those who survived, to consolidate its position. This, together with the lack of a clear economic role for women, gave the church the opportunity to become intimately involved in Irish family life. The number of priests, drawn from the increasingly dominant strong farmer milieu, rose dramatically between 1861 and 1911 – a time when the overall population was declining. By 1911 the ratio of priests to Catholics was 1 : 210. [14] In 1926 2 percent of all single males aged 45 to 54 were priests or monks. [15] The church preached the centrality of marriage and the family, the evils of all sexual activity not aimed at procreation, and held up the Virgin Mary as the model for all women. It offered women a new role: that of transmitters of the Catholic teaching that all sexual activity outside marriage, or not aimed at conceiving children, is evil.

In most countries the religious head of the household is the man. In Ireland, to this day, it is generally the woman. Women in the post-famine period were offered the role said to be the most important in society – bringing up children in the Catholic faith. To a large extent women had little choice in this. There was nothing else on offer and, in return for embracing the new morality, they received a level of respect, of status, even authority, which they could not otherwise have expected, given their changed economic role. This period also saw a tremendous explosion in devotion to the Madonna and in the practice of reciting the Rosary (a prayer to the Virgin). All over the country shrines of devotion to Mary sprang up. The Virgin Mother was the model for Irish women. The alternative was the convent or emigration.
 

Convent, emigration and permanent celibacy

Nuns made up one of the largest groups of women workers in Ireland right up to the 1970s. For many young women, faced with a choice of marriage or emigration, the convent seemed a place where it would be possible to have a job, respect and status. The number of nuns in Ireland increased eightfold between 1841 and 1901, despite a near halving of the Catholic population. This increase had started before the famine. At the beginning of the 19th century there were 11 convents in Ireland. Immediately after the famine the number stood at 91. By 1900 the number of convents had rocketed to 368 and the average size of each had grown. [16]

But becoming a nun was not an option open to all. Entry to the convent was expensive. Canon law stipulated that every entrant should bring a certain sum of money. In the mid-19th century the lowest acceptable sum was £200. The average dowry was almost £400. As a result, many nuns were from wealthy backgrounds. Most were the daughters of comfortable, large farmers or shop owners. By the end of the 19th century civil servants, clerks and other white collar workers were beginning to be able to find the dowry. In spite of the expense, one in 20 Irish women were entering the convent in the early 20th century. In 1926 some 4.9 percent of all single females aged 45 to 54 were nuns and lay sisters. [17]

For those with a vocation and no dowry, the only way to join a religious community was as a ‘lay sister’. These were known colloquially as ‘skivvies’ and were, in effect, servants to the dowried nuns. Their habits included an apron and looked like a maid’s uniform. Like servants in the big houses, lay sisters ate either before or after and apart from the dowried nuns. While anyone who wants to be a nun is admitted to the convent today, the class distinction between lay sisters and ‘proper’ nuns whose families could afford the dowry remained until the 1980s. [18]

Right up to the late 1980s huge numbers of Irish women chose emigration rather than live unemployed and dependent on their male relatives in this mean, narrow-minded, repressive society. About one third of emigrants to the United States from Europe as a whole between 1850 and 1950 were women. From Ireland the proportion was well over half. Most women who emigrated from Europe went as part of a family unit. The majority of Irish women emigrants were single and travelled alone (see Table 1). Ireland was unique in having more women than men emigrate, and the differences were dramatic. While there were between three and six times more men than women emigrants from some other countries, from Ireland there were almost twice as many women as men. [19]

This pattern of mass emigration, especially of women, continued up to the last decades of the 20th century. In 1960, for example, of the women aged 15 to 19 in 1942 more than half were living outside Ireland. [20] Despite this, emigration was seen as a male phenomenon, largely because most emigrants went to Britain and many of these were married men whose wives and children remained in Ireland, keeping consciousness of these emigrants high. Women who went to England were more likely to be single and to stay away.

For those who eschewed the convent or emigration, the role of Virgin Mother was not always on offer. In 1926 some 26 percent of women remained unmarried at 45, compared to about 10 percent before the famine. Late arranged marriages meant that women, if they married at all, married men considerably older than themselves. Before the famine about 20 percent of husbands were ten years older than their wives. By the early 20th century the proportion had risen to about 50 percent. [21]

In the 1930s almost three quarters of 25 to 34 year old men remained single in Ireland compared to a third in England and Wales. In the 1960s half of all 25 to 34 year old men remained single compared with only one in five men in England and Wales. The higher rate of female emigration was a huge factor in this. In fact, at no time after 1881 were there enough single women to marry all the single men in Ireland. For most of the 20th century there were over 140 men for every 100 women in the 45 to 54 age group. In 1961, in rural areas, there were 244 single men for every 100 single women among 45 to 54 year olds. [22]

As these figures indicate, while life choices for women were very limited, things weren’t a bed of roses for men either. Told that women were an ‘occasion of sin’ since the time of Eve, separated from them in school, church and social occasions, they were often frightened silly of their wives when their parents finally arranged a marriage – usually when the ‘boy’ had passed 45. And those were the lucky ones. The official lunacy rate in Ireland quadrupled between 1841 and 1901. Up to the 1980s men – particularly those from the rural west – continued to have vastly higher rates of admission to psychiatric hospitals. [23]

Emigration, late marriage and permanent celibacy ensured that the population continued to decline until the mid-1960s. The population of the Republic reached a historical low of 2.8 million in 1961. The aim of holding the land together was met and the material and cultural level of Irish society rose. The Land Acts of the late 19th century had allowed tenant farmers to buy their land and the conditions for the basic accumulation of capital necessary for the development of indigenous capitalism were all in place.
 

The ‘carnival of reaction’

The strong tenant farmer class became the emerging capitalist class. With the tiny urban bourgeoisie, they were the group in a position to accumulate. After the War of Independence, when Britain withdrew from the 26 counties, they were the class which came to power in the South. Connolly had predicted that partition would bring a ‘carnival of reaction’ North and South. Women in the North were needed to work in the linen and textile industry and did not suffer the same level of exclusion from the workforce as women in the South. Nonetheless, North and South, the sectarian, indeed confessional, nature of both states meant a heavy hand of sexual repression and severely limited options for women.

Much has been written about the sectarian nature of the Northern state. [24] Its mirror image in the South has usually been obscured by the North’s dark shadow. After independence the spectre of revolution haunted the island. The church moved to protect the interests of its long-time class allies and to legitimise the new ‘Free State’. Its allies reciprocated, making divorce illegal and banning even information about contraception. The chair of the Censorship of Films and Publications Committee was given to clerics, and the church’s grip on education and the hospitals was confirmed.

Less than a decade into the existence of the Free State, the needs of capital again coincided with Catholic teaching on the family. While in 1926 fewer than one woman in ten worked in industry, by the early 1930s this had more than doubled. Most of these jobs were unskilled and in new light industries such as clothing, food, drink and tobacco. But this growth in women’s employment was accompanied by economic depression and rising unemployment among men. [25] In 1935 Section 16 of the Conditions of Employment Act allowed the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Sean Lemass, to prohibit the employment of women in industry. It also fixed the proportion of women workers to other (male and child) workers and forbade employers to employ more women than men in cases where a ministerial order had been made on a specific industry.

When legislation was introduced in mid-19th century Britain restricting the right of women to work in certain industries, for example the mines, the reason given was the danger to women’s health. There was no such rationalisation in Section 16. It was a clear attempt to remove women from the workplace as a way of reducing male unemployment. It gave unlimited power, with no right of appeal, to the Minister of Industry and Commerce, and could have brought a blanket ban on women workers if the politicians so decreed. [26]

The Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC) initially supported Section 16, prompted by the attitude of the leaders of the largest union in Congress, the ITGWU. At the ITUC’s 1935 Congress, held in the Guildhall in Derry, ITGWU senator Tom Kennedy argued that ‘it was the first measure to give male labour their rightful place in the new industries’. [27] Helena Molony of the Irish Women Workers Union (IWWU) responded, telling delegates that ‘it was terrible to find such reactionary opinions expressed ... by responsible leaders of labour in support of a capitalist minister in setting up a barrier against one set of citizens’. [28]

After discussions with the IWWU, in which the women offered a compromise agreeing to the allocation of specific work to women, Congress agreed that it had to oppose Section 16.

The Labour Party, however, gave it complete support in the Dail and the Senate, and argued against the introduction of equal pay for women as a means of ensuring that women would not be used as cheap labour in preference to men. When the Conditions of Employment Act was passed, with Section 16 intact, the International Labour Organisation in Geneva placed Ireland on a blacklist.

In 1937 the new constitution gave a special place to the church and also to women. The special place for the church was at the head of Irish society. The special place for women was in the home. This meant that women were expected to have a life outside the home only while waiting to get married. This ideology proved useful for a state that had neither the means nor the inclination to invest in social services.

It was a life of drudgery, isolation and grinding poverty for most working class women. With none of the labour saving devices common today, work in the home was physically exhausting and mind-numbingly repetitive. Just 30 years ago our mothers or grandmothers had to devote an entire day each week to the washing – and another day to ironing. Many had little choice but to find some work in the home to supplement the family income, often sewing, knitting, washing and ironing for better-off women. When the children were older and at school, they went out to clean the houses of better-off women.

Women were needed in the textile factories of the North and there their right to work was not restricted by legislation. With wages much lower than elsewhere in the UK, few men earned enough to support a family, and working class women had no choice but to work. However, the ‘carnival of reaction’ meant working class women could not presume they would enjoy the benefits won by their counterparts in the rest of the ‘United Kingdom’. Every aspect of the welfare state which workers won in the years after the Second World War was resisted by the Unionist government in Stormont and Catholic bishops alike. [29]
 

Sex and childbearing

With the sexual repression of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had come the suppression of traditional methods of birth control. In the first edition of Peig, the story of an old woman’s life on the Blasket Islands in the extreme west of Ireland at the start of the 20th century, Peig explained that Blaskets women had controlled the number of children they conceived by fashioning a kind of cervical cap from beeswax. There is also some evidence that herbs and the bark of certain trees were used to induce early abortions. But all this information was suppressed and, although there were always midwives who were willing to help desperate women end intolerable pregnancies, most women came to accept that sexual activity and having babies were inextricably linked.

So sex became something that men sought and women feared. The jokes about sex being the price women paid for marriage and marriage the price men paid for sex reflected the reality of most people’s lives. Inevitably, contraception was always available to the better-off, who could go to the right doctor to be fitted for a diaphragm or travel abroad and bring supplies of condoms home. To this day a family with just two children is known in Ireland as a ‘gentleman’s family’!

Of course, for working class people, there were many contradictions. Sex was ‘the poor man’s opera’ and many a poor woman’s opera: ‘There is no poverty between the blankets.’ Constant childbearing was made worse by grinding poverty and dreadful housing conditions. Housing was expensive and grossly overcrowded. In 1926 half of all families in Dublin city and a third of all families in Cork and Limerick cities lived in ‘homes’ of one or two rooms – at a time when the average size of a household was six or more. [30] Overcrowding remained a huge problem into the 1970s, so much so that ‘one family, one house’ was one of the six demands of the early women’s movement.

The scandal of the majority of the population living in dreadful conditions was ignored by those who were doing well from property speculation arising from the housing shortage. The biggest building contractors have always been associated with Fianna Fail and could rely on the party to look after them, while church-made morality was seen to apply only to matters of sex.
 

Magdalen Laundries and Industrial Schools

While the price of sex within marriage was high, the penalty for sex outside marriage was exorbitant. If a working class woman became pregnant outside marriage, she had to leave her home in disgrace and go to one of the Magdalen Laundries or ‘Good Shepherd’ convents. Her parents had no choice but to turn her out. Any parents who tried to stand by their daughters had the priest hammering at the door, telling them it was their Christian duty to turn their back on their child.

In recent years the truth about the abuse, even torture, of women and children in the laundries and ‘orphanages’ has been revealed. ‘Pat’ described her two years in a mother and baby home in 1963 and 1964:

You couldn’t get out of the outside gate, you just weren’t allowed ... Someone always made a run for it but they were caught and dragged back ... We were bad girls, we’d had sex. We were shamed ... Six weeks after your baby was born they reckoned you were fit for work. Most of the girls were put out in the farm, working in the fields or the gardens or with the pigs and cattle. Or they were put to cleaning. Girls worked in the dormitories, the laundry, the kitchens ... [31]

The nuns, with the collusion of the state, even sold the women’s babies. ‘Pat’ told journalist Mike Milotte about the American couples who came to the home looking for a baby to adopt and her heartbreak when her son was taken to be adopted:

They had to be physically perfect, and none of the black babies that were there were ever selected ... No one ever discussed adoption with me ... I was just called over by one of the nuns and told he was going the next day ... I remember so clearly, bringing him down to the side door, hugging him, cuddling him and kissing him, and he was just swiped out of my arms by a nun. [32]

These offences did not take place in the dim, distant past. The now infamous Industrial Schools were still in operation as late as 1984. Most people over the age of 35 can remember being threatened as a child with being sent to one of these institutions if we didn’t behave.

The Industrial Schools, set up at the end of the 19th century, were known colloquially as ‘orphanages’. In fact, only about 5 percent of the children in them were orphans. The vast majority were there because of the poverty of their parents. Mary Raftery, the television producer who exposed the truth about the Industrial Schools, discovered that about 80 percent of all children committed to the schools and over 90 percent of the girls were detained under the category ‘lack of proper guardianship’. In practice, this meant the children of unmarried mothers, children who had lost one or both parents or whose families were unable to look after them due to poverty. In short, the Industrial Schools were ‘a crucial element in maintaining social control of the population’, a way of training servants and farm labourers for the Catholic middle classes and a method to ‘entrench and perpetuate a rigid class system in Ireland’. [33]

The Industrial Schools played a very important role in policing sexual repression. This is evidenced by the extraordinarily high numbers of girls in the Irish system compared to the UK. In 1933, for example, there were 1,123 girls in the system in all of Britain (population 40 million), as compared to a staggering 3,628 in Ireland (population 3 million). This was because many (poor) teenage girls were sent to Industrial Schools for the crime of being ‘sexually aware’. [34] Others were committed to the schools because of their mothers’ sexual activity. [35]
 

Health and education

With no health service and deep poverty, the number of children working class parents had to watch die was horrendous. Infant mortality soared. In 1926 in Ireland 120 of every 1,000 babies under the age of one died compared to six of every 1,000 today. [36] As late as 1949 over 50 of every 1,000 babies died before the age of one. One child in 16 born in 1949 did not live to see her or his fifth birthday. Diarrhoea and enteritis were the biggest killers of babies. Tuberculosis and other preventable and treatable diseases swept through the slums, killing older children. All these children died of poverty. [37]

The education system, too, was biased against the children of workers and the poor. While primary education was available free to those who could afford to buy books, paper and pens, and most people were at least semi-literate, secondary education was open to few. Children normally stayed in primary school until they reached 14 and then started work. Local authorities could provide scholarships, paid from the rates, for secondary school students. But local authorities were run by the business class who were not about to increase the rates just to help bright working class kids. As late as 1961 only 621 scholarships of this kind were available across the entire 26 counties. [38]

All primary schools were church-run. The overwhelming majority were managed by the Catholic parish priest, the rest by the local Church of Ireland parish. Successive education ministers reiterated their support for, indeed insistence on, church control of education. This ‘Catholic ethos’ had a dreadful impact on the education of girls. Like their brothers, working class girls suffered discrimination, bullying and open snobbery from teachers, especially priests and nuns, if they managed to get some secondary education.

Eamonn McCann’s account of the treatment of working class ‘intruders’ in Derry’s Catholic grammar describes a scene repeated in many Southern schools:

Priest in a maths class: ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘Rossville Street.’ ‘Oh yes, that’s where they wash once a month.’ [39]

The bias in the education system was not only against working class children, but against all girls. Only a tiny layer of girls were allowed to aim for higher education. Most were taught to read and write, sew, cook and pray. Women were educated to be wives and mothers. This education began from the day they started school. As late as 1985 the curriculum at primary level stated that:

Separate arrangements in movement training may be made for boys and girls. Boys can now acquire skills and techniques and girls often become more aware of style and grace ... while a large number of songs are suited to boys, for example, martial, gay, humorous, rhythmic airs. Others are more suited to girls, for example, lullabies, spinning songs, songs tender in content and expression. [40]
 

The weakness of the Irish left

Other Catholic church dominated countries have had a healthy anti-clerical tradition on the left, so the capitulation of the Irish left has to be explained. At the start of the 20th century, with the church growing ever more militant, Ireland needed a left which would take the church on and defend the rights of women, and men, to sexual freedom. If the working class was to stand together, it needed an alternative view of women’s role and position in society. James Connolly, the giant of Irish socialism, might have been expected to provide such an alternative. Unfortunately, Connolly’s syndicalism led him to see the women’s question only in relation to economic issues. Unlike Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, Connolly did not regard the family and sexual freedom as areas of socialist concern.

Although he argued frequently against individual bishops and priests, Connolly did not see the Catholic church for what it had become: a defender of capitalism. Although a materialist, he believed religion belonged to the realm of the unknowable or was a product of our ignorance of nature. This, together with his belief that the Catholic church would not oppose a socialist movement that looked like winning, led him to argue that socialists should ignore the question of religion altogether. His Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) ‘prohibits the discussion of theological or anti-theological questions at meetings, public or private’. [41] He forbade discussion within the party of all questions relating not only to religion, but also to sexual relationships. Connolly’s total exclusion of these questions ‘sprang from the same theoretical source: namely that working class consciousness would passively reflect economic conditions and move spontaneously to socialism’. [42] The limitations of Connolly’s Marxism – his syndicalism – influenced the Irish left generally, severely undermining the ability of Irish workers to defend their own interests. The result was that socialists made more and more concessions to Catholicism. During the election of 1900 Connolly proposed that all ISRP members should attend mass!

This failure to challenge the church’s view of women and sexuality weakened the ability of workers to defend their economic position. A case in point is the Magdalen Laundries. They were, in essence, sweatshops served by the slave labour of the women imprisoned there without trial or release date. During the 1913 Dublin Lockout one of the strikers, Mary Ellen Murphy, was sentenced to one month in custody for ‘assaulting one of the girls employed by Messrs Jacobs by giving her a box on the face and calling her a “scab”.’ [43] Because she was only 15 she could not be put in Mountjoy jail with the other strikers. Instead she was committed to High Park Convent in Drumcondra, where the nuns ran an Industrial School and Magdalen institution on the same site.

In demanding Mary Ellen Murphy’s release, both Connolly and Larkin used the language of priests and bishops against the women of the Magdalen institution. Instead of railing against the use of slave labour, with its inevitable undercutting of wage rates for workers in commercial laundries, they complained that Mary Ellen would be forced to mix there with ‘fallen women’. Connolly said that ‘when that girl was sent into that institution her character was foully besmirched and a damnable outrage committed’. He answered criticisms from the employers that he was exaggerating when he said the girl was in a ‘home for fallen women’:

… the girls of the reformatory were in the same chapel with the fallen women and in view of them, a partition only dividing them ... she was not forgotten by her friends, though the hell hounds of the capitalist system were trying to blacken her character. [44]

In portraying the women of the Magdalen Laundries as outcasts from the working class, instead of as the most oppressed of that class, Connolly failed to oppose the church in its mission to support capitalism in its exploitation of workers. This became clearer after Connolly’s death when the Magdalen institutions started to bid for work traditionally done by commercial laundries. Time and again the leadership of the Irish Women Workers’ Union complained that employers looked for cuts in wages and for longer hours without compensation. The employers argued that they could not pay their workers a living wage and compete with the institutional laundries. In the middle of the Second World War, when there should have been plenty of work, the IWWU had to write to the heads of the Magdalen Laundries urging them not to take work away from the commercial operations. While two Reverend Mothers had ‘friendly but inconclusive’ talks with the IWWU, others did not even reply to the union’s letters. In April 1941 Bloomfield Laundry lost a military contract to the Donnybrook Magdalen Laundry and 25 women at Bloomfield were laid off. [45]

Connolly’s approach to the Magdalen women contrasted with the approach taken by Lenin and Trotsky to the prostitutes who organised themselves in the course of the Russian Revolution. To anyone who questioned the right of these women to be part of the workers’ councils, they pointed out that as the worst victims of class society, they had more right than most to help build an alternative. Lenin’s maxim that the revolutionary has to be ‘the tribune of the oppressed’ was explained by Tony Cliff:

A revolutionary has to be extreme in opposition to all forms of oppression. A white revolutionary must be more extreme in opposing racism than a black revolutionary. A gentile revolutionary must oppose anti-Semitism more strongly than any Jew. A male revolutionary must be completely intolerant of any harassment or belittling of women. [46]

None of this takes away from the fact that, generally speaking, Connolly was a champion of women’s rights at a time when it was ‘neither popular nor profitable’. His essay – Woman, published in 1914 in The Reconquest of Ireland – echoed Marx and Trotsky with its assertion that ‘the worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave’. And the women who worked closely with him in the ISRP, the trade union movement or the Irish Citizen Army were all unequivocal about his support for women’s liberation. His daughter Nora said he regarded women as complete equals and ‘saw nothing incongruous in a woman having a seat on an army council, or preferring to bear arms to winding bandages’. [47] The feminist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington said that when it came to the fight for women’s rights Connolly never failed to respond to a call for a meeting or a protest demonstration. She credited Connolly with ensuring that the 1916 Proclamation of Independence was addressed to both Irish men and Irish women and guaranteed equal rights and equal opportunities to all citizens.

Connolly was always clearly on the side of women fighting to improve their rights as workers. But his insistence that socialists should not agitate on matters of religion or sex was to leave the Irish left with a legacy of weakness which was only overcome in the 1970s with the re-emergence of the non-Stalinist revolutionary left.
 

Resistance

It would be wrong to give the impression that there was no resistance to the fierce repression that gripped Ireland for over a century. But resistance was difficult in a country which was underdeveloped, where church and state were so closely connected, and the left was weak. Many young people, especially young women, were glad to emigrate as a way to escape the unemployment and repression.

Maintaining their hold on the land might go a long way towards explaining continuing high rates of late marriage and permanent celibacy through the 1920s, 1930s and even up to the 1960s. But the inordinately high rates can only be fully explained in the context of women resisting their exclusion from the workforce. While married women were not allowed to work, over two thirds of younger women and more than half of older single women worked outside the family home. It is difficult not to conclude that many women, faced with the choice between a life of poverty and dependence in marriage or a relatively decent single life, decided to remain single. For anyone, man or woman, to marry meant two adults living on one wage: an immediate reduction in their standard of living. By the mid-20th century, when urban employment was, if not plentiful, at least common, the population was still declining. [48]

The church, which had so firmly endorsed postponement of marriage, was now concerned at the extent of late marriage. The modernisers around Sean Lemass, then Fianna Fail taoiseach, were clear that for Ireland’s economy to develop the population trends of the previous century would have to be reversed. Bishop Lucey of Cork made the church’s new view clear:

those who remain single through selfishness, or through over-anxiety about the future, or for any other such reason – for instance, the woman who does not want to give up her independence or her job, or the man who does not want the burden of supporting a home – are failing in their duty to god, themselves, and the race. [49]

We have seen above the resistance the IWWU mounted to the 1935 Conditions of Employment Act. They and other women’s groups also fought to remove the worst discrimination against women from de Valera’s 1937 constitution. [50] And, like working women and men throughout the world, Irish women rose up from time to time to fight against the poverty which blighted their lives and the lives of their families.

Apart from domestic servants and nuns, laundry workers made up one of the largest groups of women workers. From the IWWU’s earliest days laundresses were the most militant section of the union. In 1918 women in laundries worked over 50 hours a week, were paid between seven and ten shillings and had no paid holidays. In 1936 the 45-hour week had been won, a minimum wage of 32s 6d secured, and laundry workers had been the first to win a week’s paid holiday. The success of the laundresses inspired other groups of workers. In 1936 alone, at Ever Ready hours were reduced from 48 to 44; at the Post Office a 44-hour week was conceded and nurses won a reduction from 56 to 48 hours – but only in unionised hospitals. [51]

In 1945 the laundry workers went on strike for two weeks paid holidays a year – a demand not yet made by the best organised male workers. They had put in six claims for the fortnight between 1934 and 1945, stressing the dangers to women’s health in the hot, damp working conditions. Now, ‘worn out by prolonged overtime during the war emergency’, they voted overwhelmingly (94 percent) for strike action and instituted an overtime ban. The Federated Union of Employers (FUE) recognised that, if the women won, the rest of the workforce would demand parity. It asserted there would be no negotiations until the government declared a fortnight’s holiday as a national right. The entire union, from the shop floor to the paid officials, set out to win the strike.

Although the trade union movement was riven by internal dissent – in 1945 the ITUC had split – support for the women workers was immediate. The ITUC requested all affiliated unions to offer financial support to ensure that lack of resources would not force the IWWU to give in. Defeat, it argued, would ‘be little short of a tragedy and would constitute a standing disgrace to the Irish trade union movement.’

Picket lines were livened by the laundry workers’ song, to the tune of Lili Marlene:

After three months on strike the women rejected compromise proposals outright. In an open letter to members of the Oireachtas (parliament), strike committee chair Margaret McGrath reiterated the right of the women to ‘adequate leisure, a just wage and respect for personal dignity’. They would not be returning to work until ‘our just claims are justly met’.

Two weeks later the employers indicated that they were willing to reconsider. On 30 October the IWWU and the FUE agreed that ‘all women workers employed in laundries operated by members of the federation shall receive a fortnight’s holiday, with pay, in the year 1946.’ The laundry women had opened the door. The rest of the working class poured through.
 

Economic development

The late 1940s and early 1950s in Ireland were years of stagnation and malaise economically and politically. The South was in a state of near economic collapse. Employment in agriculture continued to decline, while stagnant industry provided no alternative jobs. Protectionism had had been shown not to work but that fact had yet to be faced by the politicians. As a result, emigration had reached unconscionable levels, even by Irish standards. Of every 100 girls in Connaught aged 15 to 19 in 1946, 42 had left by 1951. Four out of every five children born in Ireland between 1931 and 1941 emigrated in the 1950s. [52]

It was clear that a new economic orientation was needed. The alternative strategy chosen to replace protectionism was to use inward investment to inject a new dynamism into the Irish economy. The ground had already been prepared to welcome the multinationals. In 1949 the Industrial Development Authority was set up and Export Profits Tax Relief introduced in 1956. In 1955 the Irish government signed an agreement with the United States giving guarantees against the expropriation of the investments of US citizens or any ban on the reconversion of their earnings into dollars. The 1958 report of civil servant T.K. Whitaker, Economic Development, which in popular history is seen as marking the beginning of the new turn, was drawn up after unofficial discussions with the World Bank. The bank sanctioned the report prior to its publication. [53]

The new turn transformed the economy, and eventually the lives of women, in Ireland. The economy grew at a rate of 4 to 6 percent throughout the 1960s and jobs began to open up for women. The growth in the economy was accompanied by a big expansion in social spending. Access to healthcare was greatly improved with a choice of doctor scheme, and children’s allowance was paid for all children. Statutory redundancy payments and pay-related unemployment benefit greatly improved the lives of workers in insecure jobs. [54] As in Britain in the years after the Second World War, the economy demanded a more educated and secure workforce. As well as the rudimentary welfare state, in 1967 free secondary education was introduced. A basic grant system for third level education was introduced in 1972. Combined with other developments, particularly the arrival of the pill – which was available as a cycle regulator, even though banned as a contraceptive – these changes were to have a profound effect on the lives of Irish women.

The effect of the introduction of free secondary education was immediate. Only two out of five 19 year olds in 1960 had completed secondary education; in 1975 it was three out of five; by 1997 it was four out of five. Because there had always been some working class boys whose parents scraped enough together to educate them out of poverty, the introduction of free secondary education had a greater effect on girls than on boys. Between 1971 and 1981 the number of girls at secondary school increased by over 100 percent and the number at third level by 180 percent, compared with 94 percent and 60 percent for boys. [55]

Between 1961 and 1971 there was a slight decrease in the number of women in the labour force. Between 1971 and 1983, as emigration slowed, the total number of women at work grew by 34 percent – the number of married women in the labour force grew by 425 percent. In 1971 there were 275,600 women aged 15 and over in the workforce, of whom fewer than 24,000 were married. By 1983 there were 389,000 women in the labour force, of whom 128,000 were married. The removal in 1973 of the marriage bar in the public service made a clear difference. [56] Women’s earnings relative to men’s stayed the same from 1955 to 1971. In virtually all years average hourly earnings for women equalled 57 percent of the male average. Then between 1971 and 1984 female earnings rose from 57 percent to 68 percent of male earnings. Although equal pay legislation had been enacted in 1976, few employers granted equality unless it was forced on them through workers’ struggles. Much of the increase in average female earnings was due to changes in the kind of jobs women were able to get. [57]

Slow as these changes were, they started to chip away at the notion that everyone was happy living with sexual repression and church domination. Dissatisfaction and anger which had been kept firmly under the surface started to emerge. The Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) was founded in 1970 by a small group of mainly professional women, many of them journalists and/or socialists. Inspired by the civil rights movements in the US and the North, and the WLM in Britain and the US, it was at that time very much a movement for liberation for all women. Thus the six demands of the first manifesto of the Irish WLM in 1971 mainly related to issues that most affected working class women. They were:

The first four of these demands dovetailed, at least to some extent, with the needs of developing Irish capitalism. The right to contraception and rights for mothers who had never been married, as opposed to widows and separated women, were more problematic as they involved going against the Catholic church. Providing single mothers with even the most miserly benefits would be seen as ‘encouraging immorality’.

The early WLM fell apart within a few years, partly through exhaustion, partly because of splits between those who wanted to get into ‘consciousness raising’ and women-only issues and those who wanted to campaign on class demands like contraception and housing. Irish Women United was set up in 1974, mainly by socialists. In 1976 the Contraception Action Programme (CAP), an organisation of women and men, started to defy the law by selling condoms and spermicides. CAP members set up stalls at open markets, rock festivals, anywhere they could invite arrest. The police obviously had instructions to ignore the provocation. [59]

In 1979 Charles Haughey, then Minister for Health, introduced a bill to make contraception legally available to married couples ‘for bona fide family planning purposes only’. It permitted contraceptives to be bought legally – but only on prescription. He described the law as ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’. It has since emerged that at the time he was involved in a longstanding extra-marital affair. It was not until 1985 that the sale of condoms without prescription to over 18 year olds was legalised. Even then they were to be sold only through pharmacies.
 

Backlash

In 1979 Pope John Paul II visited Ireland. In Limerick he said, ‘May Ireland never weaken in her witness, before Europe and the whole world, to the dignity and sacredness of all human life, from conception until death’. [60] Some of the Catholic right started to plan to make Ireland a ‘beacon of pro-life values’ in the modern world.

The Women’s Right to Choose Group was set up in February 1980 to campaign for free, legal and safe contraception and abortion on demand. Four months later the Irish Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) was launched. It is worth noting that throughout the 1970s thousands of women had travelled from Ireland to England to avail themselves of legal abortion there. Yet there was no organised anti-abortion movement. Abortion was totally illegal in the Republic. However, travel to England was expensive and only a small layer of women could access abortion there. It was only when the question was raised of abortion being legally available in Ireland that the anti-abortionists got organised.

In May 1981 the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) was launched with the aim of securing an amendment to the Constitution of the Republic which would guarantee ‘the absolute right to life of every unborn child from conception’. Just five weeks after it was founded, PLAC had secured a promise from the taoiseach, leader of the opposition and Labour Party leaders to hold a referendum on the question. [61] The shock troops of Catholicism knew that they needed to hold the referendum as soon as possible, while church rule was still unchallenged and politicians were more afraid of the bishops than of voters. So John O’Reilly, a leading all-purpose family values and anti-abortion activist, told followers that the amendment to the constitution ‘must be won while the vast majority of the Irish people were still opposed to abortion and while abortion was not too politically divisive’. [62]

Fine Gael had for some years been trying to portray itself as the liberal wing of the Irish ruling class. The party had gone to great lengths to court women voters, imposing well known feminists as candidates in safe constituencies. In 1981 party leader Garrett FitzGerald had promised a far-reaching ‘constitutional crusade’ in order to improve North-South relationships. He said, ‘If I were a Northern Protestant today, I cannot see how I could be attracted to being involved in a state which is itself sectarian’. [63] Yet he too supported a proposal to incorporate a specifically Catholic approach to abortion in the constitution. Many modernisers were disappointed by this capitulation.

Those feminists who had joined Fine Gael were not the only ones forced to tie themselves in knots to toe the party line. In its leaflet urging people to vote no in the referendum Sinn Fein The Workers’ Party (later Democratic Left) achieved the seemingly impossible – not only did the leaflet not mention abortion, it did not mention women! The press release issued by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions opposing the amendment similarly avoided mentioning abortion, although women did make a brief appearance in the final sentence. In June 1982 the Anti-Amendment Campaign (AAC) was launched at a meeting in Liberty Hall.

The experience of the AAC shows that keeping a campaign ‘moderate’ to win support is counter-productive. Although most of the work in setting up the AAC was done by socialists and radical feminists, the campaign was soon dominated by doctors and lawyers who conducted a debate that had little to do with the lives of the mass of women. Socialists were elected to the steering group of the campaign from its inception, but were always in a minority, and the question of a woman’s right to abortion, even in very limited circumstances, was rarely mentioned by campaign spokespeople. Socialists were berated for declaring themselves for a woman’s right to choose on AAC platforms, while right wing celebrities who started their speeches with, ‘I am totally against abortion, but also against the amendment,’ were feted. On the streets, on the doorsteps, working class people told us they would vote for the amendment because they were ‘against abortion’. ‘But what if someone was raped?’ we asked. ‘Oh, it should be available for women who’ve been raped,’ was usually the reply, ‘or if a woman already has six or seven kids, or if the doctor says she shouldn’t have any more.’ If the abortion issue had been faced honestly and openly, the Catholic right might still have won, but the debate would have been more advanced and the class nature of the prohibition on abortion more exposed. Instead the public debate was dominated by lawyers and doctors who used a language which was esoteric and patronising to suggest that the proposed amendment was not really about abortion but about issues plain folk could not possibly understand. The PLAC message, on the other hand, was simple: abortion kills babies – vote for the amendment.

On 8 September 1983 the eighth amendment to the Constitution of the Republic was approved in referendum by two thirds of the voters. Article 40.3.3 of the constitution now read:

The state acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.

Four months later 15 year old Anne Lovett died giving birth alone by a grotto to the Virgin Mary in Granard, Co Longford. Her baby died with her.
 

The X case

During the referendum campaign PLAC was anxious to assure voters that it was interested only in stopping the legalisation of abortion in Ireland. It was scaremongering to suggest that the right of women to travel to England to end pregnancies would be curtailed. PLAC said it would not oppose ending the stigma attached to single mothers. It was lying on all fronts. Its agenda was to turn back the tide of progress. Its hypocrisy was exposed in the middle of 1984 when Eileen Flynn was sacked from her teaching job in a convent school for having a baby outside marriage. Defending her dismissal, a Jesuit priest wrote:

Ms Flynn’s pregnancy is significant only as being incontrovertible evidence that her relations with the man in whose house she resided were in fact immoral. Had her immorality remained genuinely private, it might have been overlooked. [64]

In other words, had she gone to England and had a quiet abortion, she would not have been sacked.

In 1985 SPUC went to court to try to close down the two main pregnancy counselling centres in Dublin – Open Line Counselling and the Dublin Well Woman Centre. This resulted in a Supreme Court decision that providing information on abortion was unconstitutional. It was then that women’s health books, including Our Bodies Ourselves and Everywoman, which contained information on abortion, were removed from the shelves of Dublin libraries. Copies of magazines like Cosmopolitan had to be printed with blank pages where advertisements appeared for abortion services in Britain. Also in the mid-1980s a proposal to legislate for divorce was rejected in a constitutional referendum. It seemed that the Catholic right had won a decisive victory for reaction.

Mary Robinson’s 1990 election as first woman president was a slap in the face for the right, although the presidency’s limited powers meant she could have little practical effect. In 1992 the bigots seemed to be back in the driving seat with the emergence of the X case. On 6 February 1992 Attorney General Harry Whelehan obtained an interim injunction on the basis of the eighth amendment restraining a 14 year old girl, pregnant as a result of rape and reportedly suicidal, from obtaining an abortion in Britain. The injunction was confirmed by the High Court on 17 February, Justice Declan Costello ruling that the girl and her parents were prohibited from leaving Ireland ‘for a period of nine months from the date thereof’. [65]

The press leaked the news of the ‘internment’ of a 14 year old rape victim. Up and down the country there was an explosion of anger. Thousands of mainly young women and men poured onto the streets to say, ‘Let her go.’ Day after day and night after night thousands of women and men took to the streets. In Dublin there were several semi-spontaneous marches of up to 10,000 people – the equivalent population-wise of over 100,000 in London. These numbers were matched proportionately in Cork, Waterford, Galway and smaller towns too. In Waterford girls from all the convent schools defied the orders of the nuns and converged on the city centre, risking suspension. In one of the schools the nuns locked the doors to keep the girls in – they climbed out of the windows. There were banners improvised on lengths of computer paper saying simply ‘Let her go’. The country was convulsed. Thousands who had voted for the 1983 constitutional amendment because they were ‘anti-abortion’ said, ‘This is not what we meant at all. Of course she should go.’

The government ‘applied intense pressure on the girl’s family to appeal the High Court judgement to the Supreme Court, with the government undertaking to pay all expenses’. [66] The five Supreme Court judges who heard the appeal were not liberals. They included Hugh O’Flaherty who had represented SPUC in earlier cases around abortion information. The majority ruling turned the constitutional amendment on its head. It decreed that abortion was lawful in Ireland in the event of there being ‘a real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of the mother’ as in the case of threatened suicide. The judges went against all legal logic and agreed that Ms X had a right to abortion because they feared there would be riots if they tried to corral her at home.

The anger on the streets was about more than the High Court ruling. It was directed against the arrogance of the Catholic right, who were clearly unrelenting in trying to push women back to the 1950s. Emigration had reappeared in the 1980s. The recession of 1980–1981 had stymied growth. Nearly 200,000 people emigrated in the course of the decade. [67] The government had encouraged them to go, even petitioning the US government to give young people from Ireland Green Cards ahead of less pasty-faced people. But the drying up of US visas and rising unemployment in Britain in the early 1990s meant emigration was no longer an option. Young people who thought they could get out when they finished school or college suddenly found themselves stuck in a priest-ridden mire. But they had a new consciousness and self confidence. The howl of anger at the X case came from people who were not willing to live in this kind of society any more.

Mass action on the streets had brought the first set-piece defeat for the bishops and the bigots since the foundation of the Southern state. The floodgates were open. Later in 1992 Annie Murphy, an Irish-American who had had a love affair with the most populist bishop in Ireland, Eamon Casey, wrote a book revealing that he had a teenage son with her. It later emerged that Fr Michael Cleary, ‘the singing priest’ who had preached chastity and promoted anti-abortion groups on his radio programme, had had two sons by his ‘housekeeper’. The exposure of this gross hypocrisy gave courage to people who had been abused physically and sexually by priests and nuns under the old repressive regime. As they started to talk, news came almost weekly of priests being arrested. The moral authority of the church on sexual matters imploded. Between 1993 and 1997 priests from dioceses including Dublin, Down and Connor, Dromore, Clogher, Ferns, Ossory, Armagh, Cork, Clonfert, Elphin, Galway, Raphoe and Tuam were convicted of the sexual abuse, including rape, of children as young as eight years old. [68] It emerged that church officials, having been made aware of the allegations, had typically acted, not to protect the children and bring the culprit to book, but to protect the church and let the guilty go free – often to abuse elsewhere.

The interaction of all these factors and revelations meant that women felt more able to speak openly about the reality of their lives. With the logjam broken, the government moved to modernise the Republic. Trinity College lecturer David Norris had won a case in the European Court of Human Rights in 1986 requiring the legalisation of male homosexuality. In the wake of the mass mobilisations on the X case, legalisation was finally enacted in 1993, with an equal age of consent. A year later Emmet Stagg, a Labour junior housing minister, was arrested cruising a gay area. The government responded that Stagg was not a hyprocrite – he had always supported gay rights and sexual freedom generally. It was a ‘personal matter’. He remained a minister and held his (semi-rural) seat at the next election. In 1995 divorce was finally legalised, though with a five-year waiting period.

By contrast there has been very slow progress in the North. There are similar rates of abortion for women on both sides of the border. But in the North the issue is still swept under the carpet – this is despite three High Court judgements that abortion should be available in the North, in effect, under the same conditions as in Britain. The reason the North lags behind the South in matters of sexual freedom when for decades it was the other way round can be traced to the mass mobilisation around the X case. Kieran Allen has argued about the X case that:

… slow, molecular changes in quantitative relations can at some point transform into decisive qualitative changes, so that the past does indeed look like another country. Historically, the midwife for these enormous transformations has been struggle and mobilisation. These struggles sometimes stop short and often simply force our rulers to reorder the manner of their rule, but they are nonetheless the decisive conjunctures on which historical changes pivot. [69]

Thus the left and pro-choice forces were able to win the X case, but have not been able to force legislation to allow all women access to abortion, even under the terms of the X judgement. The blame for this lies largely with the cowardice of the mainstream left and the contentment of the middle classes. To a woman who has little problem getting £500 or £600 together to get to England, and who has access to the internet or knows about the counselling services available in the larger towns, the fact that abortion is not available at home is not a huge problem. To a woman for whom £1,000 is like a tenner to the rest of us, it is no problem at all.

Nonetheless, it is clear that North and South the changes in women’s relationship to production have been accompanied by changes in attitudes to sexual freedom. Take attitudes to children born outside marriage. As late as the 1980s having a child without a husband was considered shameful. The baby had to be smuggled into the church at a quiet time to be baptised.

Today one in four children in the North and close on one in three in the South are born outside marriage. Both North and South almost half of these children are registered by two parents, which suggests they are born into relatively stable relationships, not lone parent families.

It is in the area of teenage pregnancy that the changes in attitudes are most evident. In spite of regular outbreaks of moral panic, there has been little variation in the number of teenagers becoming pregnant over the last 25 years. The figures for the South have remained relatively steady at around 3,000 a year. The difference is in relation to births outside marriage. In the 1970s about 600 unmarried teenagers had babies every year, compared to 2,400 married teenagers. Now it is almost exactly the other way around: about 600 married teenagers, compared to 2,400 unmarried. In short, shotgun weddings are largely a thing of the past. Getting pregnant does not condemn a young woman to an unhappy marriage for the rest of her life.

The role of socialists was important in the months following the X case in halting the backlash initiated by Catholic fundamentalists. Even before the injunction against Ms X was lifted, Youth Defence was born (on Fr Michael Cleary’s radio programme). A number of the children of well known anti-abortionists announced that they, not the people on the streets, were the authentic voice of Irish youth. They made their own debut on the streets with a march in Dublin calling for a referendum to reverse the judgement in the X case. The response of some of the forces involved in forcing the Supreme Court judgement was to play down the threat of Youth Defence. The SWP argued the exact opposite – that it was vital to confront and expose the bigots. A counter-demonstration was called against the Youth Defence march. Around 10,000 anti-abortionists, most of them not young, marched. Happily, some 300 pro-choice activists were there to harass them. The counter-demonstration grew as the march progressed, and a sit-down on Dublin’s main bridge blocked the march for some time. The following day’s newspapers did not report a march of 10,000 anti-abortionists, but clashes between pro and anti-choice activists. The next Youth Defence march drew less than 2,000 and again there were counter-demonstrations. Since then they have been unable to muster more than 1,000. The intervention of socialists was crucial – had Youth Defence been able to present themselves as ‘reasonable’ people, they could have grown and reversed the gains of the X case. Instead they were shown up for the bigots they are. At the end of 1992 another referendum was held, this time to vote on the right of women to travel, the right to information about abortion, and whether or not the Supreme Court judgement should be reversed. There was overwhelming backing for the right to travel and to information and two thirds of voters opposed rolling back the Supreme Court interpretation in the X case.

Three years later, when the second divorce referendum was held, it was mainly socialists who stood up to the bishops and pointed out their hypocrisy, whereas the timidity of the liberals gave the right renewed confidence. The bigots produced a poster reading ‘Hello divorce. Bye bye daddy’, playing on the fears of women working in the home that divorce would undermine their security. The SWP produced a counter-poster with a photo of bishop Eamon Casey and the slogan ‘Let the bishops look after their own families’. Divorce was passed – but with a margin of less than 1 percent. In the aftermath, analysts credited the ‘bishops’ poster with stopping the slide by reminding people of the hypocrisy of opponents of divorce. It also illustrated how a more vigorous campaign could have produced a bigger majority for divorce. One national tabloid analysed voting patterns and said the working class had swung it for divorce. It joined a list of reforms carried out within three years of the X case.
 

The ‘feminisation’ of the workforce

As a result of the changes in the Irish economy in the 1970s, women growing up expected and demanded a life outside the home. The overwhelming majority wanted to be more than wives and mothers. They voted with their feet by joining the workforce in ever increasing numbers. The changes in female participation rates seen above were dramatic. Even more remarkable were the changes in the 1990s. By 1996 there were 488,000 women at work – an increase of 213,000 since 1971. This compares with a growth of just 23,000 in male employment over the same period. In 1996 half the female workforce was married – 241,400 married women were working outside the home, an increase of more than 600 percent since 1971.

While there had been a steady increase in women working over 20 years, the rate of growth accelerated dramatically in the 1990s. Between 1991 and 1996 women’s employment grew by 102,000, almost equalling the growth over the previous 20 years. Between 1996 and 2000 a further 128,000 joined the workforce. [70] Many are mothers struggling to combine paid jobs with caring for children. In the ten years from 1987 to 1997 the number of working mothers almost doubled, from 120,600 to 253,300. In 1997 some 75,000 working mothers had one dependent child, 79,800 had two dependent children, and 59,300 had three or more dependent children. This is to say that in Ireland mothers were by far the largest group entering the workforce in these ten years.

Most women workers are clustered in the lowest paid jobs and earn on average 73 percent of men’s wages. The differential is even greater among the lowest paid women. In 1997 the average weekly earnings of industrial women workers was 65 percent of men’s earnings, and of women in white collar jobs 72 percent [71], while women in senior management earn an average 83 percent [72] of their male counterparts’ earnings. Some of the reason for the differences comes down to the number of hours worked. In 1994 18 percent of women workers were part time. In 2000 the figure was 29 percent. In the same period the proportion of men working part time rose from 4.4 percent to 7 percent. The vast majority, both women and men, said they were not seeking full time work. A high percentage of the part time workers are mothers – 36 percent of mothers worked part time, compared to 13 percent for all other women in employment in 1997.

The number of dependent children has a clear effect on women’s participation in the workforce. Almost half of all women with fewer than three children were working in 1997. However, women with three or more children are less likely to work outside the home. Again this isn’t necessarily a matter of choice since low wages and the cost of childcare can mean women with more than one or two children simply cannot afford to work outside the home. Labour force participation is highest, at about 90 percent, for women aged 25 to 34 who do not have children, and is relatively lower in the older age groups. [73]

There is, of course, a small layer of women enjoying the wealth created by the boom. These women do not have to worry about childcare, grocery shopping, cooking or cleaning. They have nannies, maids, cooks and cleaners. One of the effects of the feminisation of the workforce has been to substantiate the stark class divide among women. Nowhere is this clearer than among PAYE workers. The following figures exclude the rich who, even ruling class supporters admit, pay little or no income tax. In 1997–1998 the bottom 25 percent of earners, women and men alike, earned less than £9,000 a year – less than half the average wage. Over half of all workers (56 percent of women and 51 percent of men) earned less than £13,500 or two thirds the average wage. On the other side are those who earned £40,000 or more – more than twice the average wage. These are not the rich – just the well-off. The majority of these are, of course, men. Twice as many men as women earned £40,000-plus – 10 percent of men and 5 percent of women. Nonetheless, those figures illustrate sharply the class divide: there is a layer of women who are doing considerably better than the overwhelming majority of women and men. Again it is important to note that these figures do not include rich women, like Margaret Heffernan of Dunnes Stores and her ilk. [74]

The changes in the North have not been so dramatic, due partly to the fact that jobs have always been available for women there who wanted to work outside the home. Nonetheless, the number of women who work, including married women and women with children, continues to grow. In 1977 the female economic activity rate stood at 42.9 percent. By 1997 it had risen to 63.8 percent.

These changes in women’s relationship to production have led to the qualitative changes seen above in how reproduction of the next generation of workers is organised within the family. And they have also led to a massive quantitative change in reproductive behaviour. North and South, the birthrate has dropped. In the South it went down from 22 per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 1980 to 13.5 in 1996. In the North the crude birthrate dropped from 20.6 per 1,000 to 14.0 in 1998. The fertility rate has dropped to well below replacement rate in the Republic and is just at replacement rate in the North. The rate of marriages has also gone down – from seven per 1,000 population in 1970 to 4.3 in 1997 in the South. Again the fall in the North is similar but lagging a few years behind. The combined effects of economic and social change have broken down many of the old stereotypes of women as wives and mothers. Although most women earn too little to break away completely, a measure of economic independence makes leaving a partner a real possibility.

The mass entry of women, especially mothers, into the workforce has had a contradictory effect on women’s lives. On the one hand, a ‘double burden’ is imposed on women – they have to do a day’s work for their employer and then come home and work again for their family. On the other hand, it has greatly enriched women’s lives and opened up new possibilities for many. This is why Marxists see the entry of women into the workforce as a necessary prerequisite to ending the oppression – it gives women a collective power they can never have while isolated in the home. Cliff described this process:

Oppression in itself does not necessarily lead to a struggle for liberation. The oppression of women, by dividing them and imprisoning them in the four walls of the home, leads most often to powerlessness and submission. Only where women, as workers, have collective power do they gain confidence to fight exploitation, and are then also able to fight their oppression as women. The other side of the coin is that women workers, like other oppressed groups, are in a period of social crisis often more spontaneously revolutionary than men. The struggle of workers against exploitation is the key to their successful struggle against all oppression. Hence the first step for working class women in entering the arena of struggle for their liberation as women is to leave the isolation of the home and enter the social area of production. [75]

Marx and Engels argued that real women’s liberation demands not only the entry of women into social production but also the socialisation of the care of children, and others needing care, and housework. They argued that the sexual division of labour is hierarchical, placing the man (Connolly’s ‘slave of capitalist society’) in superior and the woman (‘the slave of that slave’) in subordinate positions. The hierarchical principle throughout society has to be eradicated, together with the division of labour between the sexes, if women or men are to have full equality. For Marx and Engels, the abolition of the sexual division of labour under communism will be ‘an integral part of the ending of all divisions of labour’. [76] They wrote:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. [77]

Cliff explored what more the abolition of all division of labour could mean:

Only after the division of labour has been abolished will men and women attain the full development of their human personality. Communism will therefore bring real freedom to the individual. Communist society, declares The Communist Manifesto, will be ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. [78]

Not only is socialism necessary for women to have the freedom to enjoy work, rest, play and bringing up children, the liberation of women is necessary for men to be able to enjoy real freedom too.
 

Irish men

The Catholic right and some right wing journalists have tried to portray the fight for women’s rights as a ‘battle of the sexes’, where any advance for women has to mean suffering for men. This is not true. Women certainly bore the brunt of sexual repression and church domination, but men too suffered greatly. The dreadful psychological and psychiatric effects of celibacy and late marriage on the bachelors of rural Ireland are well documented. They lived empty, lonely lives and died alone. [79]

For decades married men who couldn’t get work in Ireland travelled to England to dig ditches, build railways and make motorways. They worked all hours to make money to send home to the wives and children they saw once, at best twice, a year. They shared squalid bedsits for one with two or three other married men. The stereotype of the drunk Irishman in London is of someone who drinks every penny he makes. In fact, many worked such long hours they had time for drinking only, or at least mainly, at weekends. There are loads of songs by and about these men, but we rarely think about what they really meant:

Working such long hours, they could have afforded a good lifestyle if they hadn’t been sending most of their money home. By no stretch of anyone’s imagination can it be argued these men benefited from the oppression of their wives and daughters in Ireland. Quite the opposite. If there had been jobs open to their wives, maybe they would not have had to live such miserable lives. Then, when they were too old to work, they returned ‘home’ to a wife and children who didn’t know them and who had built lives of which they had no part. And before they had time to get to know these wives and children, the lost years caught up on them and they died strangers in the home they had worked their lives away to build and maintain.

In an atmosphere of total sexual repression, gay men and lesbians had no hope at all of leading happy, open lives. When sexual activity is closely tied to reproduction within a family based on marriage, gay sexuality cannot blossom. When all sexual feeling outside marriage is condemned, all same-sex feelings are condemned. Mick Hanly’s All I Remember describes feelings that could be recognised by anyone, gay or straight, brought up in pre-1980s Ireland:

There used to be a joke that you’d know an Irishman because he was the one who’d climb over a naked woman to get to a Guinness. Generations of Irish children grew up without ever being hugged or kissed by their fathers or seeing affection between their parents. At least the women had the children to love and hold. Like the men living on the family farm waiting for their parents to die and the men living in London bedsits waiting to be able to go home, the men with the best deal, living in Ireland with their own families, often led empty, lonely lives too.

The same forces that have freed up women’s lives in Ireland have freed up men’s. Even ten years ago few men in Ireland would be seen pushing a pram, or know how to change a nappy. That has changed, and what have men lost? Nothing, and gained a lot. They can now hope for a fairly equal relationship with a woman who is a friend, rather than an adversary. With more laid back attitudes to sex, more men as well as women are able to have decent sex lives. They have warm and loving relationships with their children, who generally do not fear their fathers and usually love them. Gay men too have gained. The rapid transformation has produced tolerance, not just for all kinds of non-marital heterosexual relationships, but for homosexual relationships also. Of course, homophobia is still alive and well in Ireland as elsewhere, just as sexism is. So many families are still taken aback when their sons or daughters come out to them. But increasingly parents in Ireland as elsewhere come around, accept their child’s sexuality and end up welcoming their partners into their homes. The questioning of the church’s authority on sexual matters gave men whose childhood had been taken away by paedophile priests the chance to speak out and name and shame their abusers. So, far from losing out to advances in women’s rights, men have benefited considerably.

Men in Ireland have also played their part in helping to win some of the rights gained by women. In the 1970s and 1980s, when Catholic-dominated hospital ethics committees made it impossible for women to get sterilised, Ireland had an extraordinarily high rate of vasectomies. Vasectomy was available on an out-patient basis through the illegal family planning clinics, so men did not have to go through ethics committees. Men in Ireland showed solidarity with their partners by getting the snip in large numbers. [80] The Contraception Action Programme, the Women’s Right to Choose Campaign and the Anti-Amendment Campaign were all mixed organisations, with women in the leadership but large numbers of men involved. In 1984 during the strike of cleaners in University College Dublin the women argued hard and long with the relatively large female workforce of the university for solidarity action. None materialised. The one group of workers who took solidarity strike action was entirely male – construction workers building a new block on the site. While the ‘sisters’ in UCD let the cleaners down, the builders, usually portrayed as macho wolf-whistlers, came through for the women of their class.
 

Wages, childcare and abortion – the limitations of the Celtic Tiger

There are three areas of women’s rights that cannot be ducked in the Irish Republic. Pay and working conditions, abortion and childcare are all linked. None are easy for even the fastest growing Western economy to solve within the confines of the market.

Wages and childcare: The massive influx of women, and especially married women into the workforce has not been accompanied by a huge rise in working class standards of living. Many women are working simply to maintain previous standards as inflation bites deeper into the family budget. A small layer is doing very well, as illustrated by the quadrupling of sales of BMW and Mercedes cars between 1987 and 1997. But for the majority, the Celtic Tiger means little. Ireland comes second only to the US in having the highest proportion of its workforce categorised as low paid. The share of the workforce earning less than two thirds of median earnings is now 23 percent, one of the highest rates in the OECD. The real hourly earnings of the worst paid 10 percent of the workforce have stagnated or fallen slightly while those of the top 10 percent have risen steadily. As a result, the ratio of earnings of the top decile to the bottom for men working full time increased from 3.5 to 5 times between 1987 and 1994. [81]

The average female industrial wage in 1998 was £220.11 a week, the average male industrial wage £340.55. [82] In the same year the average cost of full daycare in a childminder’s home was £71 a week. [83] The cost of a full time place in most Dublin creches at the end of 2000 was £100 a week. Prices of childcare, as a proportion of parents’ earnings, are amongst the highest in the European Union, with average full-day care prices at 20 percent of average earnings and over 40 percent of the average industrial wage for women. [84] If economic growth is to continue, the government needs to encourage more women into the workforce. But that means providing more affordable childcare, and the market is unable to do that.

Packages of capital grants for private and ‘community-run’ creches and after-school projects have been made available. [85] But the biggest problem faced by providers of childcare facilities is labour costs. Nursery and creche owners find it increasingly difficult to get workers for a wage which allows them both to make a profit and to keep charges at what parents are able to pay. The only way around this for the state is to provide publicly funded creches or to subsidise private and community-run nurseries. That would, however, go against the neo-liberal consensus that the market will provide. So the plan is for more capital grants for providers and cuts in personal tax to help parents pay – which will discriminate against women living in poverty who benefit least from tax relief.

Rocketing house prices make it yet more difficult for families to afford childcare. Even with two full time salaries, many couples on average earnings cannot afford a house. It has been said that this generation of young people is ‘obsessed and terrorised by property prices’. [86] Small wonder – at the start of the boom in 1994 Dublin house prices were 4.3 times the average annual industrial wage. In 1998 this had risen to 8.2 times. By 2000 the ratio was 10 times plus. [87] Given that banks and building societies are reluctant to lend mortgages of more than three to four times a couple’s combined annual wage, people on average wages just can’t afford to buy houses.

With house prices rocketing, many younger families have no choice but to live in the outer suburbs of the larger cities. Bad planning and bad public transport have contributed to a massive increase in commuting times – some people are spending four hours a day, 20 hours a week, just getting to work, according to the Dublin Transportation Office.

Reducing the abortion rate: This combination of low wages, high childcare and housing costs, and transport problems impacts on the incidence of crisis pregnancies and therefore on the rate of abortion. Any strategy for reducing the abortion rate has to start from the reality of people’s sexual lives today. Most people in any kind of steady relationship are having sex. For most young people a night’s partying includes at least the possibility of sex. So the first thing needed is a free and easily accessible contraceptive service.

Recent government-funded research suggests that the lack of a decent contraception service is to blame for many or most of the unwanted pregnancies ended by Irish women in England. Only a third of the women with crisis pregnancies interviewed had been using reliable contraception. Of these, fewer than 10 percent had been using the pill, with a little more than 20 percent using condoms. Asked why they were not using a reliable contraceptive, there were three main answers: the prohibitive cost; lack of access to a family planning clinic; and fear of being thought a ‘loose woman’. [88] While contraception is free on the NHS in the North, contraceptive advice and services must be paid for in the South by all but medical card holders. So most young people and all students have to find £30 to £40 to get a few months supply of the pill. Even for many women who have a decent enough job, the cost of a visit to a doctor and then of a prescription puts the pill beyond reach. Making all contraceptive services free on the health service is a first obvious step in reducing the number of abortions. Providing more family planning clinics is also vital.

Many women said they wouldn’t go on the pill if they were not in a steady relationship, although they would have sex occasionally. They cited the attitudes to sex with which they had been brought up. ‘If you’re on the pill, you’re ready for sex’ – they saw this as something to be ashamed of. The research showed condoms to be the most popular method of contraception. When condoms burst – or when someone has unprotected sex – the obvious next step is emergency contraception. However, while the November 2000 Oireachtas report on abortion recommended emergency contraception to be made more easily available, the next month the Irish Medicines Board banned Levonelle, the new progesterone-only ‘morning-after pill’, now available over the counter in pharmacies in Britain and Northern Ireland. It refused Levonelle a licence because it may work by preventing a fertilised egg from implanting and the constitution still guarantees the fertilised egg’s ‘right to life’ from the moment of conception. [89]

The Women and Crisis Pregnancy report concluded that ‘while abortion is often considered tantamount to a rejection of nurturance ... many women set high demands for motherhood and speak of how little they can offer a child and the way it contrasts with how much they would like to offer a child, or what they consider appropriate to offer a child’. [90] In other words, women say, ‘I want better for my children than I would be able to offer now.’ Given what we have seen above of the low wage, high cost Celtic Tiger society, most of these women are simply being realistic.

The research indicates that the best way to reduce abortions is to end Catholic church domination of the schools and to have more openness about sex and sexuality. We know that the average age of first sexual intercourse in the Republic in 1997 was just under 16. [91] Sex is not a big deal any more – and it need not be if proper precautions are taken. But that means changing attitudes towards young women being on the pill or carrying condoms. The view of women’s sexuality that sees taking the pill outside of a committed relationship as shameful belongs with the Magdalen Laundries in the 1950s, but it is the view still being peddled in the schools. The idea that ‘nice girls don’t’ or that it’s alright to ‘get carried away’ but not alright to acknowledge your sexuality and protect yourself from getting pregnant lies behind many of the unwanted pregnancies which end in abortion in England. A proper sex education programme, open and explicit about sexual practices and contraception, would go a long way towards reducing the number of abortions.

An opportunity for such a programme arose when the Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) programme was introduced to secondary schools in 1997. But the state failed to stand up to the bishops. The ensuing fudge means that only about half of all schools provide an RSE programme and the content of the programme and the resources used in its teaching are decided by the schools, over 80 percent of them controlled by the bishops. Despite all that has happened, the state still backs off before church-approved bigotry.
 

Conclusion

There has been a rapid a rate of change over the last 20 years in relation to women’s position in society, to sexuality generally but especially to lesbians and gay men, and to the way children are treated. In other words, change in the form of the family. We have seen how that change has been the result of the interaction of changes in women’s relationship to production with other issues thrown up by those changes. Women workers have been among the first to demand a share of the wealth created by the workers of the Celtic Tiger. Nurses, a profession which had been regarded as a ‘vocation’ went on all-out indefinite strike in 1999 and forced the government to concede many of their demands. But the problems facing women workers in the Irish Republic, as elsewhere, cannot be solved in a society that puts profits ahead of the needs of ordinary people. The opportunities for women to join the workforce are seen as a mixed blessing by many. On the one hand, there have been practical, visible improvements in the position of women in society and in sexual freedom for all. But women (and men) work long hours, their lives are more stressful and, particularly for those with children, can be a difficult juggling act.

Over the last 30 years we have seen global capitalism open the doors of workplaces at all levels to women. While the numbers of women in the boardrooms and parliaments of the world are still tiny, they are growing. As we have seen, there is a small layer of women which is able to sidestep the worst oppression. But the exploitation and oppression of the majority of working people are necessary for the survival of global capitalism. And if the Celtic Tiger’s boom economy cannot deliver on the needs of the mass of women, then it is clear capitalism never will.

The real hope for women’s needs being put before global capitalism lies in the growing anti-capitalist movement. The disproportionate extent to which rampant globalisation impacts on women’s lives has been a theme of critics of neo-liberal development models for over a decade. [92] What is exciting about this new way of putting women’s liberation on the political agenda is the way the root cause of women’s oppression and the real enemy is clearly identified as the same system that exploits the majority of men. And it is important to put women’s liberation at the heart of the anti-capitalist movement in Ireland perhaps more than in many parts of the world. In the slump of the late 1980s the right were able to gather support with slogans like ‘Jobs not divorce’ and questioned the right of married women to work. As the US economy catches a bad cold, economists fear the Celtic Tiger will develop pneumonia. The right will try again to exploit uncertainty and desperation to blame working women for growing unemployment. But women now make up 44 percent of trade union membership. They are a large and quickly radicalising part of the Irish working class. They will not go back to the kitchen.

Notes

1. Cited in T. Inglis, Lessons in Irish Sexuality (Dublin 1998), pp. 10–11.

2. Irish Examiner, 4 December 2000.

3. For a full discussion, see L. German, Sex, Class and Socialism (London 1989).

4. T. Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Catholic Church in Modern Irish Society (Dublin 1987), p. 117.

5. M. NicGiolla Phadraigh, Religious Practice and Secularisation, in P. Clancy, S. Drudy, K. Lynch and L. O’Dowd, Ireland: A Sociological Profile (Dublin 1986), p. 147.

6. M. Ruane, The Irish Journey: Women’s Stories of Abortion (IFPA 2000).

7. J.J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918 (Dublin 1973), p. 6.

8. J.C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603–1923 (London 1966), p. 173.

9. G. Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland Before the Famine 1798–1848 (Dublin 1972), p. 137.

10. J.J. Lee, Women and the Church Since the Famine, in M. MacCurtain and D. O’Corrain (eds.), Women in Irish Society (Dublin 1978).

11. G. Ó Tuathaigh, op. cit., p. 206.

12. J.J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, op. cit.

13. T. Inglis, Moral Monopoly, op. cit., p. 118.

14. E. Strauss, Irish Nationalism and British Democracy (London 1951), p. 104.

15. R.E. Kennedy, The Irish, Emigration, Marriage and Fertility (London 1973).

16. C. Clear, The Limits of Female Autonomy: Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland, in M. Luddy and C. Murphy, Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Dublin 1990), p. 21.

17. R.E. Kennedy, op. cit.

18. C. Clear, Walls Within Walls: Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland, in C. Curtain, P. Jackson and A. O’Connor (eds.), Gender in Irish Society (Galway 1987).

19. R.E. Kennedy, op. cit.

20. NESC, The Social and Economic Impact of Emigration (Dublin 1990).

21. J.J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, op. cit.

22. Ibid., p. 168.

23. C. Curtain and A. Varley, Marginal Men? Batchelor Farmers in a West of Ireland Community, and A. O’Hare and A. O’Connor, Gender Differences in Treated Mental Illness in the Republic of Ireland, both in C. Curtain et al., op. cit.

24. See E. McCann, War and an Irish Town (London 1974), and M. Farrell, Northern Ireland: the Orange State (London 1976) for the best accounts.

25. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989), p. 190.

26. M. Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries (Dingle, 1983), p. 235.

27. Quoted in K. Allen, Fianna Fail and Irish Labour (London 1997), p. 59.

28. Quoted in M. Jones, These Obstreperous Lassies: A History of the IWWU (Dublin 1988).

29. See, for example, L. McShane, Day Nurseries in Northern Ireland: Gender Ideology in Social Policy, in C. Curtain et al., op. cit.

30. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, op. cit.

31. Quoted in M. Milotte, Banished Babies: the Secret History of Ireland’s Baby Export Business (Dublin 1997), pp. 140–141.

32. Ibid., pp. 144–145.

33. M. Rafferty and E. O’Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children: the Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools (Dublin 1999), p. 26.

34. Ibid., p. 28.

35. See, for example, the story of Mary Norris, ibid., pp. 29–40.

36. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, op. cit., p. 124.

37. Central Statistics Office, That was Then, This is Now: Changes in Ireland 1949–1999 (Dublin 2000), pp. 36–37.

38. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, op. cit., p. 362.

39. E. McCann, op. cit., p. 15.

40. Quoted in U. Barry, Who Owns Ireland – Who Owns You? (Dublin 1985), p. 58.

41. K. Allen, The Politics of James Connolly (London 1990), p. 28.

42. Ibid., p. 4.

43. P. Murray, A Militant Among the Magdalens?, in Saothar 20 (1995), pp. 11–54.

44. Ibid..

45. M. Jones, op. cit., p. 176.

46. T. Cliff, Marxism on Oppression, in Marxism at the Millennium (London 2000), p. 50.

47. Quoted in M. Ward, op. cit., p. 224.

48. Ibid., p. 13.

49. Quoted in R.E. Kennedy, op. cit., p. 159.

50. See M. Ward, op. cit.

51. See M. Jones, op. cit., ch. 12. The following description of the laundry workers’ strike is taken from that work.

52. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, op. cit., p. 378.

53. For a full account of this period, see K. Allen, op. cit., ch. 5.

54. Ibid., ch 6.

55. Ibid., p. 35.

56. Ibid., p. 36.

57. Ibid., p. 39.

58. For an outline of the early history of the women’s movement in Ireland, see A. Smyth, The Contemporary Women’s Movement in the Republic of Ireland, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 331–341, or J. Levine, Sisters (Dublin 1982), ch. 6.

59. See J. Levine, ch. 14.

60. Quoted in J. Beale, op. cit.

61. Ibid.

62. Irish Catholic, 1 April 1982.

63. Quoted in K. Allen, op. cit., p. 165.

64. Quoted in N. McCafferty, The Best of Nell, p. 55.

65. See A. Smyth, A Sadistic Farce: Women and Abortion in the Republic of Ireland, 1992, in A. Smyth (ed.), The Abortion Papers Ireland (Dublin 1992).

66. Ibid.

67. K. Allen, op. cit., p. 171.

68. E. McCann, Dear God (London 1999).

69. K. Allen, op. cit., p. 167.

70. Central Statistics Office, Quarterly National Household Survey, December 2000.

71. Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Delivering Gender Equality 1999–2004: Fourth Equality Programme (Dublin 1999), p. 11.

72. The Missing Sex: Women in Corporate Ireland, Business and Finance, 23 April 1998, pp. 20–23.

73. Central Statistics Office, op. cit., p. 111.

74. Revenue Commissioners, Statistical Report (Dublin 1999). All figures are in Irish pounds (punts).

75. T. Cliff, Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation: 1640 to the Present Day (London 1984), p. 10.

76. Ibid., p. 239.

77. K. Marx and F. Engels, quoted ibid., p. 47.

78. T. Cliff, ibid., p. 239.

79. C. Curtain and A. Varley, Marginal Men? Batchelor Farmers in a West of Ireland Community, and A. O’Hare and A. O’Connor, Gender Differences in Treated Mental Illness in the Republic of Ireland, both in C. Curtain et al., op. cit.

80. Irish Family Planning Association, Annual Report (Dublin 1989).

81. Ibid., p. 76.

82. www.cso.ie/econseries/industry/qibq762.htm. All figures are in Irish pounds. [Note by ETOL: This link has not been checked to see if it still works.]

83. Partnership 2000 Expert Working Group on Childcare, National Childcare Strategy (Dublin 1999), p. 12.

84. Irish Congress of Trade Unions, op. cit., p. 5.

85. Irish Times, 19 July 1997.

86. M.A. Wren, Changes In Public Policy Could Ease Stresses, Irish Times, 18 May 2000.

87. K. Allen, op. cit., p. 94.

88. E. Mahon et al., Women and Crisis Pregnancy (Dublin 1999).

89. Ireland on Sunday, 17 December 2000.

90. E. Mahon et al., op. cit., p. 274.

91. T. Inglis, op. cit.

92. See, for example, S. Joekes and A. Weston, Women and the New Trade Agenda (New York 1994); W. Vee and N. Heyzer, Gender, Poverty and Sustainable Development (New York 1995); C. Harman, Globalisation: a Critique of the New Orthodoxy, International Socialism 73 (Winter 1996); A. Hale, Trade Myths and Gender Reality: Trade Liberalisation and Women’s Lives (Manchester 1998).

 
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