Why Irishwomen are still waiting for their own Independence Day
We had substituted dictation from Westminster for dictation from Maynooth. This became clear with the disclosure in 1951 that our politicians were secretly taking orders from a wholly unelected body the Irish Catholic Hierarchy.
People are usually appalled when they hear of the outrageous treatment of women in Muslim countries, but women here were shamefully treated as second-class citizens until quite recently. In the decade and a half following World War II this country had the highest rate of female emigration in Europe. No doubt this was partly because of the way that they were treated in their own land. Unmarried women were exploited in the workplace. They were not paid as much as their male counterparts, and they had few chances of advancement. Once they got married they had to resign from the civil service and a whole range of other jobs, including teaching and the banks.
