Too many women suffered before Ireland embraced the spirit of 1968

“If I have one regret,” my friend Patricia said, “it’s that I lived in Paris in the summer of 1968, and it all went over my head.” We were talking about the ‘good old days’ (people of our age do that). In 1968, she had just done her Leaving Cert in a Catholic Irish school and was an au pair with a French family that had been vetted by her parents. No wonder history passed her by that year.

Of all the years to have been alive, and to have missed out on the experience, 1968 might be the hardest. It’s often described as the year that changed the world. Paris was in tumult. It was a summer of student riots that sparked off generations of change. Before Paris 1968, many of the great issues of liberation that have dominated Irish politics for the last 20 years were unthinkable.