The Message: Fight the bigots

It may be hard for our younger readers to imagine, but at the beginning of the 1970s, the sale of condoms was banned in Ireland. You might search high and low for the precious prophylactics but you couldn't get them.

This was a direct result of the control insidiously exerted by the Roman Catholic Hierarchy over the political process in Ireland. Catholic teaching was – and indeed still is – that the use of contraception is immoral. Our craven politicians bent the knee and did what the bishops dictated. Condoms were verboten. So was the pill.

In 1973, a citizen by the name of Mary McGee took a constitutional case against the Irish State, asserting her right, as a married woman, to use contraception. Because of a medical condition, pregnancy would have exposed her to the possibility of a fatal illness. In effect she was being denied the right to full sexual intercourse by the Irish state.

The Supreme Court decided in her favour, asserting that there was a constitutional right to marital privacy, including the option of using contraceptives to avoid (in her case a potentially fatal) pregnancy. When the Minister for Health in the Fine Gael Labour coalition government of the time subsequently introduced a bill in the Dáil legalising contraception, the then Taoiseach – a sad case by the name of Liam Cosgrave – infamously crossed the floor of the house, to vote against his own party's legislation. Scandalously, in cowardly deference to Catholic teaching, the bill was defeated. Mary McGee, the message was, could take a running jump at herself. Let her get pregnant and die...

For all sorts of reasons, that coalition government was shown the door in the General Election of 1977. The following year, in a fantastically ludicrous piece of self-serving chicanery, the new Fianna Fáil Minister for Health, Charlie Haughey – a noted hammer man and adulterer, who must surely have been using contraception with his mistress(es) – introduced legislation, which allowed married couples to buy contraceptives in Ireland. But only (a) in pharmacies; and (b) if they were prescribed by a doctor. Needless to say, a huge number of pharmacies – genuflecting to Rome once again – refused to stock condoms. Charlie Haughey described it as an Irish solution to an Irish problem. We might nominally have been a Republic, but people’s right to personal integrity in relation to their sexual activities didn’t matter. The Vatican dictated and hypocrisy ruled.

As we know, the law was liberalised eventually: first, in 1985, with prescriptions no longer being required; and finally in 1993, when sanity at last prevailed and the Health (Family Planning) (Amendment) Act of 1993 allowed for the open sale of condoms to anyone over the age of 17.

In more ways than one, 1993 was a landmark year in Ireland in relation to sexual freedom. Until then, same-sex sexual activity between consenting males remained illegal in Ireland. I don't mean to be crude, but if one bloke fucked another, they both could be charged and found guilty, the legal penalty ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment. The law was never enforced – but the threat was there and gay people knew it. As a result, a lot of them felt that they couldn't be open about their sexual preferences. They stayed in the closet.

Again, this was directly down to the influence of the Catholic Church. As far back as 1988, in a ruling on a case taken against the Irish State by David Norris, the European Court of Human Rights had decided that the law which criminalised homosexual acts in Ireland violated the human rights of individual gay men. But, over the course of the intervening five years, nothing had been done by our politicians to change the law. Without any compunction, Catholic dogma was ruthlessly forced down everyone else’s throats. The prevailing establishment attitude was: if you want to do that sort of thing, why don’t you bugger off to London, Amsterdam or New York? Frightened, hurt and disillusioned, a lot of gay men and women did just that.

Behind the scenes, pressure was put on politicians, to ensure that being gay was still viewed as a crime here. The ideology of Irish Catholicism was oppressive in the extreme, insisting that it was preferable to hold a threat of jail over gay men than to allow them to express their sexuality.

In the end, the Mary Robinson effect made all the difference. She had campaigned for contraceptive rights. She had also taken David Norris’ case to the European courts. Now she was the President of Ireland. Her election was a signal that – whatever about our politicians – Irish people wanted to be mature, open and inclusive in their attitudes to gender and to sex. Continuing with the blatant denial of human rights to gays became untenable. In 1993, homosexual acts were at last decriminalised.

However, a rump of reactionaries remained steadfast in opposition to homosexuals and homosexuality. And they still do. The baseline position of homophobes is that they really don't like the thought of blokes fornicating. They are horrified at the idea of two men pleasuring one another. Of course, it runs deeper than that too. While remaining strangely evasive, silent and defensive on the subject of their own priests' grisly sex crimes against children, religious moralists want to impose rules on everyone. Their rules. They want to tell you what you can and can't do with your sexual organs.

Don't let anyone touch you till you're married! Only ride someone if you want to have a baby! Never touch your penis yourself except to go to the toilet! Don't ever let another girl touch your breasts or stroke your thigh to the extent that you get pleasure from it! And so on...

Would it be unfair to describe these people as perverts? Of course they are perfectly entitled to run their lives – and their sex lives – according to any rules they like. But their main interest in life seems to be stopping other people freely exploring their sexual preferences and the associated pleasures of whatever kind. And in order to achieve this, they are capable of dreaming up a very long list of prohibitions. Don't pull this! Don't touch that! Especially if it is with someone of the same sex! God gave you a vagina to have babies with! Your penis is an instrument of the Lord! Bless yourself and don't look down – it's disgusting!

The lesson of these past few weeks is that these people have not gone away. They're back with a vengeance, once again trying to use money, power and influence to mount a last-ditch resistance to gay marriage.

So, in the debate on gay marriage, it is important to remember our history, and the extent to which the vested interests of the Catholic Church, clerical and lay – in a grossly hypocritical manner – opposed every step forward taken by Irish people in relation to sexual freedom; and every step forward taken by gay people on the road to equality.

We support equality, diversity, openness, tolerance, respect and love. Anyone who does will vote yes to gay marriage. Stay strong and the reactionaries will not prevail.