Goretti Horgan Archive | ETOL Main Page
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995, pp. 15–17.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
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Religious conservatism and sexual repression have gone hand in hand for generations in Ireland. Goretti Horgan explains the roots of Church power and argues that things are changing for the better |
The fall of the Irish government as the result of a scandal about the cover up of a priest’s sexual abuse of children, brought to the surface many of the stereotypes about Irish people – priest ridden and sexually repressed the lot of us!
The power of the Catholic Church in Ireland and, in particular, its success in repressing sex and sexuality is indeed peculiar to Ireland. But this has nothing to do with ‘the Irish psyche’ or anything particularly religious about Irish people.
Up to the 16th century one of the complaints made by English commentators about the Irish was their ‘licentiousness’ and the lack of stigma which they attached to children born outside marriage. In the 6th century, when Ireland was supposed to be the ‘island of saints and scholars’, every heterosexual liaison was recognised as a type of marriage – even one night stands! Homosexual liaisons were seen as a problem only if they led to the men involved neglecting the sexual needs of their wives. The concept of illegitimacy simply did not exist.
The power of the Catholic Church over sexual matters in Ireland has nothing to do with the peculiarities of Irish people. That power has material roots which lie in the role played by the Church’s teachings on sexual matters in the development of capitalism in Ireland.
For centuries colonialism ensured that the Catholic Church was identified with the oppressed in Ireland. Britain had introduced penal laws in the mid-17th century, making Catholics second class citizens unable to rent, still less own, any sizeable tracts of land and unable to enter the professions. It was illegal to celebrate or attend mass.
This attempt at suppressing Catholicism didn’t work. As Wolfe Tone, the Protestant leader of the unsuccessful rebellion in 1798, wrote, ‘Persecution will keep alive the foolish bigotry and superstition of any sect’.
In the last half of the 18th century, and particularly in the wake of the French Revolution, the British government decided to change tactics and to try to build an alliance with the Catholic bishops. In 1795 it subsidised Maynooth College as a national seminary for Catholic priests. The Vatican was unsure about the usefulness of such an alliance but it was never developed.
Instead, the Catholic Church was to move towards an alliance with the emerging Catholic bourgeoisie. In the wake of the Great Famine of the mid-1840s sexual repression by the Church was to play an important role in promoting capital accumulation by this class, allowing it to become the new Irish ruling class. This role first gave the Catholic Church’s view of sexuality the kind of power it has traditionally had in Ireland.
The famine had decimated the rural poor, several millions of whom either died of starvation or were forced to emigrate. The tiny plots of land they had worked were taken over by the larger tenant farmers (holding over 15 acres). This tenant farmer class survived the famine intact and emerged as the strongest class in Catholic Ireland.
In 1841 only 18 percent of land holdings on the island of 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 numbers of holdings had fallen from 691,000 in 1841 to 570,000 in 1851 and 517,000 in 1891.
The large tenant farmer class was determined that the fate that had befallen the smaller tenant farmers during the famine was never going to happen to their class. In order to ensure this two things were necessary. First, the custom of dividing the land between all the sons in a family would have to be discontinued and the holdings passed on to one son only. Second, the number of children born to families would have to be limited.
It was here that the Catholic Church was to prove an important ally. The Church was, anyway, a natural ally to the large tenant farmer class. Most priests came from this class, which was the only Catholic class which could afford to educate its children. In 1808, of the 205 students in Maynooth, 78 percent were the sons of farmers. Only the larger farmers could afford to send their sons into the priesthood.
The large farmers, together with the urban merchant class, provided much of the money and personnel to run the churches, convents, schools and hospitals which sprang up all over Ireland following the end of the persecution of Catholicism.
The Church was crucial in providing the ideological basis for the sexual repression which ensured the pattern of late marriages and permanent celibacy which was to become the norm in Ireland.
Of course, the Church could become far more strict about sexual matters, preaching hellfire and damnation from the pulpits, and it still need not have made much difference in the privacy of bed had it not been for the third element in all this – the role of women.
Before the famine women had made an essential contribution to the family economy and as late as 1841 women accounted for more than half the non-agricultural labour force. Most of this economic independence was based on spinning wool, cotton and linen.
But the number of spinners fell by about 75 percent between 1841 and 1851. Only in the Belfast region, where linen became a factory industry, did this work survive the combination of industrial revolution and famine.
Women no longer had a clear economic role in the family. At this point the Church became involved in Irish family life, preaching the centrality of the family, the evils of all sexual activity not aimed at the ‘procreation of children’ and holding up the Virgin Mary as the model for women. Women, domesticated, became transmitters of Catholic ideology – a role they have played right up to the present.
In most countries of the world the religious head of the household is the man; in Ireland it is generally the woman. Women in the post-famine period were offered a role said to be the most important within society – bringing up children in the Catholic faith, with Catholic sexual morals, Catholic fear and Catholic guilt. The Church did not have to police the family – the Irish mother did it for them.
To some extent the women had little choice. There was nothing else on offer and in return for embracing the new morality they received a level of respect, of status, even of authority which they could not have expected given their changed economic role.
This period also saw a tremendous explosion in devotion to the Madonna, to the Rosary – which is a prayer to the Virgin – and all over the country shrines of devotion to Mary sprang up. The Virgin Mother was the model for Irish women who wanted to be accepted in society; the alternative was to emigrate.
About one third of emigrants from Europe as a whole between 1850 and 1950 were women, but from Ireland the proportion reached more than half. Most of the women who emigrated from Europe went as part of a family unit; well over half of Irish women emigrants were single and travelled alone.
For the women who remained the role of Virgin Mother was not always on offer. By 1926, about 25 percent of women remained unmarried at the age of 45, compared with about 10 percent before the famine. Late, arranged marriages meant that women, if they married at all, married men considerably older than them. 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.
Things weren’t exactly a bed of roses for the 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 after the ‘boy’ had passed 45. The quadrupling of the official lunacy rate in Ireland between 1841 and 1901 probably says it all.
Emigration, late marriage and permanent celibacy did, however, stem the growth in population. The land was held together and the material and cultural level of Irish society rose. The Land Acts of the late 19th century 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 strong tenant farmer class became the emerging capitalist class – with the tiny urban bourgeoisie they were the ones in a position to accumulate. They were fed up of being the middle man between Britain and the exploited classes in Ireland. They wanted to be bosses in their own countries so they joined in the nationalist cause.
Despite Republican mythology to the contrary, the Catholic Church was quite supportive of the nationalist cause in Ireland. Of course, the Church condemned people like Fintan Lalor and James Connolly who meant it when they said they wanted the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland. But when it came to the people who constituted their traditional social base – the large farmers and their children who had since become lawyers, teachers, doctors, civil servants and joined with the urban bourgeoisie – the Catholic Church was fully in support.
As it became clear to this group that independence was needed to advance their interests as a class, the Church moved with them. By the 1918 general election when Sinn Fein swept the board, Catholic bishops publicly endorsed them.
After independence the Church moved to protect the interests of its long time class allies and to legitimise the new ‘Free State’ as the South was then known. This legitimacy was vital in a country which had come to the brink of revolution in 1919–21.
In return, the new state made divorce illegal; banned even information about contraception; gave the chair of the Censorship of Films and Publications Committee to clerics and maintained the Church’s grip on education and the hospitals. In 1937 the constitution gave a special place to the Catholic Church and ensured the ban on divorce would never be lifted except by referendum.
Up to the 1970s the Church maintained its control, but changes in material conditions started to challenge that power.
Industrialisation in the 1970s produced job opportunities for women on a scale not seen in the lifetime of the state. The number of economically active women in the Republic increased by 50 percent between 1971 and 1991, while the number of active men increased by only 10 percent.
Right up to the 1970s it was assumed that once a woman got married she would give up her job (even before children arrived). In 1961 only 5 percent of married women were in paid employment. Today almost a third of married women work outside the home.
Economic changes gave women in Ireland an alternative to the role of domestic religious educator and moral police force. As women started to go out to work, they started to opt for the alternative. That meant a different attitude to sexual matters, more equal marriage relationships and a completely different view of sex outside marriage.
As early as 1979, surveys found that 75 percent of married couples used a form of contraception not approved of by the Catholic Church at some time in their marriage. The average family size has halved over a single generation. Women are no longer being forced into marriage because they find themselves pregnant; the number of ‘shotgun’ weddings of teenagers has fallen from 2,400 in 1971 to 600 in 1991.
Despite the ban on abortion, Irish women in their early 20s are as likely to have an abortion as women in Britain, and more likely than women in Holland. Single women who decide to continue their pregnancies usually opt to bring the child up themselves, rather than to give it up for adoption.
Of course, the Church has fought back. The abortion referendum of 1983 gave women equal status under the constitution with a newly fertilised egg. In the divorce referendum of 1987, 60 percent of voters opted to maintain the ban on divorce. Both of these showed that the Church could mobilise a backlash.
But the Church and its allies in the ruling class could not turn the clock back. When in February 1992 a 14-year-old rape victim was prevented from travelling to England for an abortion, all the contradictions within the Catholic position on abortion came to the fore. Over 10,000 people – mainly young men and women – took to the streets of Dublin demanding, ‘Let her go!’
People who had voted in favour of the anti-abortion amendment to the constitution phoned radio talk shows to say they never meant this to happen. The supreme court read the anger of the streets and, fearing riots if they did otherwise, announced their decision to allow her abortion. The decision was a political, not a legal one.
This became known as the X case and was the first of a series of events that have seriously eroded the power of the Catholic Church, particularly regarding sexual matters. Since the X case, Bishop Eamonn Casey – one of the most populist of preachers against pre- and extra-marital sex – was discovered to have a teenage son by an American woman.
The horrible truth about the abuse and degradation to which Catholic sexual morality subjected women and children has been slowly but relentlessly exposed. Institutions known as Magdalen laundries, where unmarried mothers were locked up for their entire lives and forced to work in slave labour conditions, were a subject for hushed conversation only. Then, when the land one of them was on was sold by the Church to property developers for several million pounds, there was an explosion of anger from relatives of women who had been incarcerated and tortured there.
Stories of physical, emotional and sexual abuse in Church run homes all over the island have become the regular diet of newspaper investigation. Journalists who expose one horror report that they are inundated afterwards with details of other more horrific stories of abuse.
The Father Brendan Smyth case, which led to the fall of the Reynolds government, was not unusual in any way in terms of his sexual assaults on children. What was different was the way in which the case exposed the frantic attempts by the Church and its allies in the ruling class to cover up what was yet another blow to Church authority.
The result of the attempted cover up has been the opening of the floodgates as generations of adults who had been abused by priests and nuns start to talk openly about it. And the present generation of children have also started to talk about the abuse that is still happening.
Every new allegation, every new conviction of a paedophile priest, exposes the hypocrisy of the Church. Women with eight or ten children who had been told that they cannot use contraception and must either stop having sex or continue having children are confused and angry.
There are clearly more changes and more revelations to come.
Goretti Horgan Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated on: 3 November 2019