Sex in Ireland - Swapping tyranny for exploitation?

WHAT the “special vice squad”, which patrolled the streets of Cork in 1935 because of concern about “the growing number of sexual offences coming to light”, would make of any Irish city today is not hard to imagine.

At the time “offences against morality were increasing ... to a really serious extent” and there were fears that those gripped by “moral panic” would seek to establish “a body of special police who will patrol the streets, asking young girls where they were going and sending them home if they are not satisfied with the answers”.

Not quite extremists flogging women because their burkas were not standard issue but close enough. Nobody beaten or stoned to death either but personal freedom, as we have come to understand and cherish it, threatened if not completely put aside. It is not recorded if those who advocated the vice patrols felt it might be necessary to question young men in the same way.

As in so many ways the past is a very different country and today’s extract from Diarmaid Ferriter’s Occasions of Sin, Sex in Twentieth-Century Ireland (pages 10 and 11) shows how very distant that country is now.

Anyone even using the vocabulary of that 1935 discourse outside a comedy setting today would be laughed at, dismissed as the most prudish crank. The laughter might be genuine but there would be a thread of nervousness running through it as we all realise how very recently that dreadful intolerance ruined people’s lives. Even a moment’s consideration will remind us of lives destroyed in recent decades because those involved did not follow, or were just accused of breaching, the received sexual compass.

We all know that this was a repressed, misogynistic, insular society and though the Catholic Church played a central role in establishing and enforcing these morés they had very many enthusiastic helpers, men and women, only too happy to make life miserable for those who did not conform.

In recent years we flaunted our economic success while we could, but our evolution into a more tolerant, liberalish society was a far greater an achievement. We have, possibly, too quickly forgotten the courage it took to face down our own extremists. We have forgotten the price people like the late Eileen Flynn paid to live the lives they chose for themselves.

With liberation comes choice but it brings challenges too and those challenges, especially for our children, are all around us.

They are, as President Obama said earlier this week, an unavoidable part of modern life. They are brought to us through social networking sites and other internet facilities. These are overwhelmingly good things but that does not mean we should turn a blind eye to the harm they can do.

We laugh at the 1935 vice squad absolutely certain that we are right and that they were wrong. Could we, if they patrolled the cities of our towns and cities last Wednesday night, as our teenage children celebrated their Junior Certificate results, dismiss their criticisms so easily? Could we convince them that we have not stumbled over the boundary between liberalisation and exploitation?