Sir,—While perhaps not as strident and personalised as Kelvin Angle (Letters, ‘If it quacks like a duck …’, HI 32.5, Sept./Oct. 2024), I would sympathise with his general summary. I believe the term ‘historical presentism’ describes it best.
‘Modern/liberal’ Ireland is held up as a paragon of societal perfection. However, we can only properly critique let’s call it ‘McQuaid’s Ireland’ by comparing it with other societies in relation to the hot-button social issues. The results are surprising. Specifically, regarding unmarried mothers and corporal punishment, it transpires that ‘Catholic’ Ireland compares favourably with the UK, the US and the Scandinavian countries. The UK enforced over 250,000 adoptions between the mid-’50s and mid-’70s. UK legislation referred to unmarried mothers as ‘moral imbeciles’ until the late 1950s. The UK government sensibly refused to issue a public apology on the basis that virtually every sector of society was complicit in the policy. A majority of US states had a policy of compulsory sterilisation of unmarried mothers, enthusiastically supported by leading abortion advocate and racist Margaret Sanger. The Scandinavians refined matters further by forced abortions and sterilisation of unmarried mothers. Ireland now deals with unwanted children by aborting them, hardly a sign of compassionate progress.
Our corporal punishment regime mirrored the UK’s Victorian policy of ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’. Recent revelations by Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, shows that physical/sexual abuse was rampant there also. The Roger Waters/Pink Floyd album The Wall is about the abuse he suffered in school. Thankfully, Ireland abolished corporal punishment in 1982, four years before the UK.
In society generally, Brian Fallon’s An age of innocence (1999) illustrates how culturally vibrant Ireland was between 1930 and 1960. Ireland had more literary magazines and theatres per capita than the UK, including the Royal, the largest in the UK and Ireland.
So, on a comparing and contrasting basis, it transpires that ‘McQuaid’s Ireland’ was not so bad after all—by no means perfect but, in a proper historical context, nothing to be ashamed of.—Yours etc.,
ERIC CONWAY
Navan