The Catholic Church, backed up by the state, are obviously the main culprits for the culture of fear and conformity that permeated the whole of society
But what sort of responsibility do ordinary people of the time bear? Because nobody can tell me that parents of young women who acquiesced with sending their daughters to mother and baby homes do not bear some responsibility - though in some ways these parents were also victims - of brainwashing - sort of like how Trump's foot soldiers are victims of brainwashing, but also guilty of buying wholesale into a rotten culture
To go against this culture of conformity required courage and critical thinking and an unbreakable moral compass, it required immense bravery for sure, but a culture of fear can only rule if ordinary people acquiesce
It was a culture of crushing conformity - of strict patriarchy, of soft tyranny, somewhat similar in mindset if not always in law to that in post war European authoritarian regimes
But authoritarian regimes and authoritarian ideologies can only survive if people voluntarily submit
Everything was about conformity - you had to be straight, get married, have children in wedlock only, the mother stayed at home while the father went to work
Anything outside this norm brought "shame" to those individuals involved and their families - fornication, children out of wedlock, homosexuality, contraception, marriage break up, women getting ideas "above their station"
Corporal punishment was rampant, the Christian Brothers and others terrorised children, and the GAA perpetuated this official culture - "Faith Of Our Fathers" was sung at the All-Irelands, JC McQuaid threw in the ball, kissing the Archbishop's ring
Ordinary people, the foot soldiers for the Church/State regime, participated in the perpetuation of this culture of shaming and ostracising those who did not conform
If one thing changed Ireland, it was technology, it was the increasing influence of Britain and America
From about the late 1950s on, things changed gradually
The marriage bar in the Civil Service was only abolished in 1973, things like the Eileen Flynn case were still happening in 1982, when a teacher in Wexford was sacked for becoming pregnant by a separated man, in the 1980s Ireland voted for the 8th Amendment and to reject divorce
But then, at the start of the 1990s, they changed suddenly
It is hard to believe, but homosexuality was still criminalised as late as 1993, marital rape was still legal as late as 1990, in the early 1990s contraception was still only available on prescription - the "Irish solution to an Irish problem", as Haughey put it
The years 1990 to 1992 - particularly 1992, changed everything - Mná na hÉireann asserted themselves, and then the Bishop Casey scandal turned the tide against the Catholic Church once and for all, the 29 years since have been a litany of expositions of shame for the Catholic Church, one after another
In 1992 Lavinia Kerwick went public as a rape victim, The X Case happened, and for the first time the Irish people voted to enshrine women's right to an abortion
Then things changed gradually again, before picking up speed again in the decade just gone, and really only in 2018 when the 8th Amendment was abolished was this process finally completed - if it actually has been - and that's debatable
A certain conformity to those old "norms" does still exist, it will never go away entirely I think, not in my lifetime anyway
