Terry Prone: The long and messy history of the condoms we now take for granted

On this day in 1988, the Virgin Store in Dublin started to sell condoms for the first time — and it was illegal until five years later

There are a plethora of urban myths surrounding condoms, including the one that said one in every thousand was punctured to ‘give God a chance’.

Here is a unique claim to fame. Here, in fact, are two claims to fame likely to be unequalled.

The first is that I probably know more about condoms than any reader of this paper. The second is that I have probably owned more condoms at any one time than any reader of this paper.

I mention this not in association with Valentine’s Day. As if I would pollute the red rose romance of tomorrow with such a crude association.

No, the actual catalyst for outing these odd claims to fame is that it was on this day in 1988 that the Virgin Store, alongside the Liffey in Dublin, started to sell condoms for the first time.

It did it illegally, and that went on for some time. It was 30 years ago this year that condoms were first legally sold throughout Ireland.

After the illegal sales in the Virgin store and elsewhere, the condom issue took on the flavour of inevitability.

Maybe it wasn’t the fastest kind of inevitability — the interval between the contraceptive train protest and the full entitlement to stop conception was wearily long.

But nevertheless the arc of justice was slowly bending towards freedom on this issue, which is why Durex approached the company I then ran to look at making their product acceptable to the masses.

All very hush-hush

It was all hush-hush. We were to say nothing to nobody about condoms until all was revealed after the necessary legislation was passed.

OK, we said, somewhat puzzled about what we might leak, if the longing to leak was on us.

Turned out that they were going to share the history, the manufacturing process, and all sorts of other proprietary secrets with us, so we couldn’t be running off to tell our mothers about it. (Not that our mothers, at the time, would necessarily have been the first audience for secret condom data.)

Once we were retained, they started by telling us about the slow development of the condom down through the century.

Ireland's relationship with birth control was complicated over the years.

Some of that social history nobody needs to know. The bits of animals deployed in historic times for baby-prevention purposes testify to the import of the task and to the boundless creativity of the human mind in coming up with protective mechanisms for other parts of the human.

They’re also impossible to read about except in a full body crouch, so painful must they have been in action, you should pardon the expression.

The manufacturers were somewhat distracted and quite impressed by my husband’s knowledge of this strand of history, he having studied ancient classics, which apparently made reference to sexual devices, the ancients not being anything like as constrained about the subject as was the Ireland of 30+ years ago.

Even he, however, was somewhat surprised to find that the Goodyear tyre and the condom have a relationship. First cousins once removed, you might say.

In the 19th century, a guy named Goodyear invented, or perhaps discovered, rubber vulcanisation. This led to the creation of tyres, but also to the development, in the 1850s, of the first rubber condoms.

The only problem, our clients told us, was that they were a bit thick. The condoms of the previous century, I mean.

Oh, and they had to be customised for each wearer. (This bit of arriving information served as a cue for all of my male colleagues to go back into their full body crouches.)

Latex didn’t arrive for another 70 years. We forebore to ask the man with the PowerPoint presentation how the bespoke inner tube devices sold within that period.

He moved on to modern times and augmented the slides with film clips that were the antonym of pornographic.

They dealt with the manufacturing and testing processes. The latter, if I remember rightly, involved randomised selection and filling of the winning condoms with a selection of liquids of varying viscosity and temperature.

Not that they would, in the wild, so to speak, be exposed to material of boiling oil temperature, but you never know.

We learned about the urban myths surrounding condoms, including the one that said one in every thousand of them was punctured by a superfine needle to give God a chance. (Untrue. God was given no chance.)

We trained spokespeople, developed information sheets. When condoms went on the market, a profitable anti-climax happened. Grand. As well as paying us, they gave us product.

Freebies, in other words. Thousands of them. And not just your straightforward type, either.

My desk was crowded with supersized ones, big ones, small ones. Bright neon ones and sad grey ones. Ones shaped like bunches of grapes, ones pleated like accordions and ones that lit up. Enough to keep the Red Army protected for quite some time.

I swept them into the pedestal drawer beside my desk and forgot about them until the day one of my staff came to me, mauve in the face with rage, describing a practical joke a freelance working for us had played on him.

This was long before company protocols and policies about bullying, under which practical jokes can fit.

I soothed the sufferer and promised I would deal with the joker. (You can’t say to the victim of a practical joke that it was actually quite funny, although it was.)

When the perpetrator bounced into my office later that day, I never let on that he had broken an unspoken rule. He dropped his briefcase against the wall of my office and headed off to take his class.

I picked up the briefcase, which, oddly, was made of wood, opened it on my desk and piled condoms into it. So many condoms that I had to lie on the lid to get it closed. Then it went back against the wall.

It was fair to assume that when he arrived home and opened his briefcase, its contents would burst out and require explanation.

The only problem was me missing that this trainer wasn’t headed directly home after his session in our boardroom. Instead, he was due at Mount Anville secondary school to give a lecture to adolescent students there.

Needing to get a pen, he lifted his briefcase onto the podium in Mount Anville and clicked it open, whereupon it vomited condoms of every kind right, left and centre.

He stood paralysed, trying to make sense of this, while the students he was due to address rushed up to help him replace what they thought was his property in his briefcase, a couple of them favouring him with surprisingly knowledgeable smirks as they did so.

He came back to the office afterwards to find out what he had done to deserve the free gifts and went off to apologise to the victim of his practical joke.

However, he did point out as he did so that sending a lecturer to a convent school equipped to cover the floor with condoms might not have been the best marketing approach for a communications consultancy that was looking for business.