Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Conservatism knows no borders in Ireland

Standing defiant: the story of how Dublin women travelled to Belfast for contraceptives in the 1970's is told in the musical The Train, with music from Riverdance composer Bill Whelan, shown at the MAC from Wednesday. Picture by Ros Kavanagh
Standing defiant: the story of how Dublin women travelled to Belfast for contraceptives in the 1970's is told in the musical The Train, with music from Riverdance composer Bill Whelan, shown at the MAC from Wednesday. Picture by Ros Kavanagh Standing defiant: the story of how Dublin women travelled to Belfast for contraceptives in the 1970's is told in the musical The Train, with music from Riverdance composer Bill Whelan, shown at the MAC from Wednesday. Picture by Ros Kavanagh

Sunday just past was a day of snapshots, of conservatism north and south versus radical citizens defending female rights.

On its last day in existence, the Citizens Assembly in Dublin voted by a healthy majority for unrestricted access to abortion. Dreamed up to buy time, convened to tackle a subject that terrified the Dáil, the randomly chosen gathering was a blatant government stunt. But the citizens produced a vote that could shape a referendum enabling abortion on demand.

Leftwing TD Ruth Coppinger said the assembly had voted ‘that women should no longer have to travel for their healthcare and human rights.’ She saw it as defeat for, and contradiction of, the ‘mantra tone-policing’ that society is only ready for minimal abortion.

Tone-policing north and south keeps going. The Sunday Times reported the Bishop of Elphin, Dr Kevin Doran, insisting that the long overdue new maternity hospital in Dublin as proposed by government will have to observe Catholic teaching - because an order of nuns owns the site, and it is proposed they should also own the public, taxpayer-funded hospital. Health minister Simon Harris claims Church interference with medical treatment will be blocked. But the plan is full of thorns, not least that the order is the Sisters of Charity, who have failed to pay their share of damages for abusing children in their care.

Meanwhile, a sold-out run finished on Sunday at the Mac in Belfast, of a musical - about the Contraceptive Train protest in May 1971. In the half-century since Irish women have kicked over many restrictions. Reproductive rights still rally fundamentalists, and paralyse supposed legislators.

Clever, witty and wise, ‘The Train’ makes electric entertainment from the story of Church and state combining to make Irish women into breeding machines. The 47 feminist women who went to Belfast by train one Saturday in May brought back contraceptives un-buyable in the Republic’s shops, forbidden for sale there, impounded by customs if imported from abroad. They suspected the state wouldn’t know how to deal with them and in Connolly Station the customs officers faced with spermicidal jelly and tablets – aspirins passed off as the contraceptive pill – certainly had no notion of how to enforce the law. Nor had the gardaí in the station round the corner, where the women marched next.

Laugh, or cry? The light-hearted cheek of the train protest followed the young Irish Women’s Liberation Movement’s public meeting the previous month that to their surprise packed out the Mansion House. The star speaker was a proud unmarried mother, though unmarried mothers then were meant to be silent out of shame. From the long list of campaigning issues, forbidden contraception became the focus.

As the lyrics of the show put it ‘Lately the argument’s gained some prominence/ So we’re campaigning for heads and for hearts/We’ll show the old farts who maintain their dominance/ Over our other constituent parts.’

But oh progress is slow. On the ‘We own our hospitals’ protest in Dublin on Sunday, Parents for Choice activist and Father Ted writer Graham Linehan said he no longer finds any of this funny.

Protesting has to keep spirits up, as well as demanding the change that surely must happen in spite of conservatives across the island. Denying choice to women is the one reliable point of agreement here between unionists and nationalists. DUP assemblyman Jim Wells says there must be no attempt to re-establish a Citizens Forum to bolster a restored Stormont, as Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams recently suggested. Wells fears any such civic gathering would likely come up with support for gay marriage as well as abortion provision, and on this Jim is right as well as right-wing.

Like the rest of Stormont’s SDLP/Unionist anti-abortion lobby, he sees Christian principle where others see backwardness on social morality. Plus cowardice. But then, that 1971 train left without this writer, proud supporter of the cause, faint-heart when the crunch came.

On March 31 three of us had invaded Leinster House through an open window (which turned out to be the Gents) during a protest supporting Mary Robinson’s attempt to introduce a contraception bill. Gardaí escorted us out. A reporter got our names. Next day a Belfast neighbour told my mother she’d seen me on the front page of the Irish Times and until she saw it my poor mother thought I’d made it into journalism at last.

I hadn’t the heart to take the Contraceptive Train and do that to her again.

But the protest made history, and gave it a good shove.