Theory on the Edge

Irish Studies and the Politics of Sexual Difference

N. Giffney, M. Shildrick, N. Giffney, M. Shildrick

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137315472
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Theory on the Edge brings together some of the foremost specialists working at the interdisciplinary interface between Irish Studies, feminist theory, queer theory, and gender and sexuality studies in order to trace the contemporary development of feminist thinking and activism in Ireland.

P A R T I

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Politics

C H A P T E R 1

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The Politics of Sexual Difference: The Enduring Influence of the Catholic Church

Ivana Bacik

In order to understand anything about Irish society and the politics of sexual difference in Ireland today, it is necessary to understand the enduring influence of the Roman Catholic Church. “The Church,” as it is usually called, has wielded considerable power for centuries in this country. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, the drastic restrictions imposed upon the rights of Catholics by the British government through the Catholic Relief Acts merely served to strengthen the Church’s position in society, and the will of the people to practice their chosen faith. Catholicism thus became the religion of social and political defiance, of nationhood and patriotic identity—inevitably, this makes for a potent cocktail.

Catholic emancipation was formally secured in 1829. Since then, the Church has amassed significant power in Irish society. Although this was especially notable after independence in 1922, the Church was placed in a powerful position much earlier, with the passing of the Charitable Bequests Act, 1844, for example, which recognized it alongside the established Church (the Church of Ireland). The Catholic Church gained the power to have ownership and control of many schools, hospitals, and social services across Ireland, confirming its role as a social-services provider in the absence of a national government, and even prior to independence.

In the twentieth century, the fight for independence was finally won, and the Church moved into alignment with those in power in the new Free State, and with successive governments, making its influence felt in every sphere of public life. As academic Maura Adshead has written, “The Irish State, from the beginning, was ostentatiously Catholic” (2003: 172). The power of the Church reached its peak during Eamon de Valera’s first terms of office as head of the Irish government (1932–1948), with the infamous influence of Catholic Archbishop John Charles McQuaid on the drafting of the 1937 Constitution, Bunreacht na hEireann. The influence of Catholic doctrine upon the wording of the fundamental rights Articles is especially notable. Although the reference in the Constitution to the “special position” of the Catholic Church as “the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens,” originally contained in Article 44, was removed in 1972 by a referendum, the strong influence of Catholic doctrine and religious belief is still clearly evident in the text of the Constitution, the Preamble of which begins

“In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred” and which goes on to “humbly” acknowledge “all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ.”

Ever since independence, the Catholic Church has thus had enduring power in Ireland—it is no coincidence, in the land where the president, every member of the Council of State, and all judges are required to take an oath beginning “In the presence of Almighty God” and where the national broadcaster still carries a denominational religious message (the “Angelus”) at 6 p.m. every evening, that when we speak of “Church and State,” Church always comes first.

In part, this is through sheer force of numbers, as it has always been the Church of the vast majority of the population. Even now, most recent census figures indicate that the vast majority of the population is still identified as Roman Catholic (84 percent in the 2011 census, representing however a significant drop from almost 92 percent in 1991). However, a total of 269,800 people declared themselves as having no religion in the 2011 census—a 45 percent increase in this category from 2006, making those of no religion the next biggest belief group after Roman Catholics. By contrast, a total of 129,000 people identified themselves as belonging to the Church of Ireland, the next largest religious grouping after Catholics.

Apart from its numerical strength, the Catholic Church has also maintained significant power in Ireland through its substitution for the state in the provision of social services, particularly in education, health, and welfare. The importance in Ireland of the “third sector,” or community and voluntary sector, in delivering social services usually provided by the state in other systems is well known. The Community and Voluntary Pillar was even regarded as one of the social partners during national pay and partnership negotiations in the 1990s. Long before then, the Catholic Church had taken on a key role in lieu of state responsibility:

Voluntary activity, especially by religious orders and their concern with charity and the poor, played a major role in providing supplementary welfare provision. The church-based education system—at primary and secondary level—and voluntary hospitals, predate the foundation of the State. The primary role of church-based voluntary organisations and services provided by religious orders in meeting education and social welfare needs continued after the foundation of the State. (Government of Ireland White Paper, 2000: 48)

Indeed, as the White Paper points out, the roots of the voluntary sector in Ireland today can be traced back to the Church-based philanthropic organizations of the eighteenth century. Although the state gradually after the 1950s began to take on a wider role in funding voluntary activity, notably with the enactment of the Health Act 1953, religious groups continue to play a strong role in service provision through the voluntary sector. The state and laypersons are increasingly filling the gaps that have appeared in voluntary service provision due to the decline in religious vocations—but many of the services remain under the effective control of the Church and Church-run institutions.

The powerful influence of Catholicism thus continues to this day. The nature of the Church’s role may be changing, and even reducing, but the Church continues to exert a strong influence on the everyday lives of all Irish citizens—and on the sexual politics of Irish society.

In the areas of education and health, in particular, the institutional Church continues to have great power, with both control by the Church and indirect subsidy of the Church by the state built into the structures of our education and health systems. In education, over 90 percent of the 3,200 state-funded primary schools (“national schools”) are owned and controlled by the Catholic Church, with religious instruction in the Catholic doctrine provided throughout the entire school day by means of an “integrated curriculum.” The state may pay the teachers, but the Church calls the tune. Less than 70 schools nationally are run on a multidenominational basis by the “Educate Together” organization—yet parents are increasingly demanding this model of education for their children. There are at last welcome signs of change with the establishment by the Minister for Education in 2011 of a National Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the primary sector, and a commitment given by the Minister in 2012 to ensure that some Catholic schools are to be transformed into multidenominational schools; but this will be a slow process, and there are already clear signs of resistance from within the Church.

In welfare provision, too, through its lay organization the St Vincent de Paul Society, the Catholic Church continues to act as a sort of “shadow welfare state.” Catholic bishops continue to wield huge power within Irish society, through their role in education and welfare in particular, despite scandals over extensive sexual abuse of children in their care and the care of Catholic religious orders until recent times, and despite grave public concern over the way in which the Church attempted to deal with that abuse and to protect those alleged abusers within its ranks.

Of course, religious practice is a comfort and a necessity to a huge number of people, regardless of their chosen belief system, and they should all have the right to practice their chosen religion. The nub of the problem with the role of religion in Ireland is however that the Catholic Church as an institution still retains disproportionate influence in civil society. In today’s pluralist Ireland, a multicultural society with an increasingly secular population that is growing ever more disillusioned with revelations about abuses of power perpetrated by those in the institutional Catholic Church over the years, especially following publication of the Ryan Report (2009) and the Murphy Report (2010), this is quite simply an antiquated and unsustainable state of affairs.

In his comprehensive work on sexual policy and Irish society, Occasions of Sin, Diarmaid Ferriter (2009) suggests that our sexual history is as complex as in many other countries. What emerges from his work however is the sense that while there may have been little uniqueness about Irish sexuality, the Irish state responded with laws that were uniquely submissive to the doctrines of the dominant Church. From independence in 1922 onward, he writes that the Catholic Church wielded a pervasive influence. Its leading ideologue, Archbishop McQuaid, appeared to find sex itself intrinsically sinful, apparently finding any public airing of issues to do with the female body or reproduction distasteful. Despite McQuaid’s influence, Ferriter argues that Ireland was not unusually sexually repressive in some ways, compared to, for example, Italy or Spain at comparable periods in each country’s history. However, those countries moved to legalize contraception and divorce long before Ireland, and the state appeared less submissive to the doctrines of any one church.

Truly unique to Ireland was the extent of the state’s reliance on religious orders to provide institutional care to children. Indeed, as the Ryan and Murphy Reports on child abuse in religious-run institutions have so graphically illustrated, thousands of children in Ireland suffered years of systematic abuse, physical and sexual, in those institutions for many decades between the 1930s and the 1970s. A climate of fear was pervasive in those institutions, as documented by the Reports and by personal accounts of the survivors of abuse.

Readers of Ferriter’s book, of the Ryan and Murphy Reports, and of other accounts of child abuse over this period, will become increasingly angry about the failures of policy makers over many decades to confront Catholic Church doctrine on sexuality. Undoubtedly, the Church’s view of sex as sinful was a causal factor in the infliction of enormous unnecessary human suffering. Women who became pregnant outside marriage, and their children, were treated particularly harshly both by the Church and by society. Perhaps, the harshest punishment was reserved for those unfortunate women who entered the “Magdalen laundries,” institutions run by orders of nuns like the Good Shepherd Sisters. These women and girls were abandoned by an uncaring state, made to give up their babies for illicit adoption, and forced to work in conditions of slavery. In this context, the introduction of a state allowance for unmarried mothers in 1973 was hugely significant, and followed by the almost equally important right to paid maternity leave. Despite these important advances, however, it would be 1987 before the status of illegitimacy was finally abolished.

By then, the influence of the Church was greatly diminished, although the “sexual revolution” usually defined as occurring during the 1960s did not really begin in Ireland until the 1970s. Indeed, the battle over the legalization of contraception dominated the debates on sexuality in Ireland throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The campaign to legalize contraception, led by brave individuals like Dr Michael Solomons (a key founder of the Irish Family Planning Association) and Mary Robinson, whose contraception bills in the Seanad helped to force change, was of course finally successful in 1992.

Another lengthy campaign, which was instituted to reform the law on homosexuality, finally succeeded in the passing of decriminalizing legislation in 1993. In the decade preceding that development, courageous activists like David Norris led the way in securing progressive legal change. Since then, civil partnership for gay couples has been legalized through legislation in 2010, but the campaign for marriage equality continues.

In the development of the Irish education and welfare systems, just as in the development of social policy, it is clear that the Catholic Church has had a strong influence. This influence is also clear in the development of the Irish health-care system. As a result, there have been serious implications for the way in which sexual and reproductive health matters are treated. Like education, health care in Ireland has traditionally been controlled and run by the Catholic Church. This has had a huge impact both on the way the health service is structured and on the way individual hospitals are run. That some sort of national direction has been lacking from our health system until now may well be a legacy of the handing over of control of hospitals and nursing homes to a myriad of religious orders, each of which brought different management structures to bear. What each had in common was the Catholic ethical code, and this in turn influenced, and limited, the types of services made available to patients.

This has been true for a very long time. The most famous, or notorious, example is of course the Church’s vicious role in cutting down Minister for Health Noel Browne’s proposed health-care scheme, the “Mother and Child Scheme,” in 1949. The success of the Church in forcing the government to abandon a health program that would have vastly improved the health of mothers and children caused Browne to write bitterly in his autobiography, Against the Tide, that in his view, the hierarchy had become the factual instrument of government on all important social and economic policies in Ireland. As early as the 1940s, senior political figures were deeply concerned about the impact of the Catholic Church on the health system. In truth, an organization primarily concerned with the health of the soul could not have been able to prescribe accurately and objectively for the health of the physical body, nor, for that matter, for the body politic.

One of the biggest problems arising from Church influence in medical matters was, as with the Mother and Child Scheme, the curtailing of medical procedures made available to patients. In particular, the Church’s influence on dictating the kinds of reproductive health services available persists to this day, although happily not to the same extent as in the past—but this limiting of the Church’s role has been very hard won, and there have been many casualties in the process.

The barbaric practice of symphysiotomy, for example, was apparently routinely carried out in some Irish maternity hospitals right into the 1980s for so-called ethical reasons. This procedure, performed during childbirth, involved sawing through the pelvis so it opened like a hinge. Many of the women upon whom it was performed have suffered lifelong incontinence, difficulties in walking, and other physical and psychological effects as a result. Almost none of the women was consulted before the performance of the symphysiotomy and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Emergent Strands or Theory on Edge?
• Women’s Studies and the Disciplines
• Part I   Politics
• Part II   Culture
• Contributors
• Index