20th Century Social Perspectives

Coercive confinement in Ireland: patients, prisoners and penitents

Coercive confinement in Ireland: patients, prisoners and penitents Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell (Manchester University Press, £65) ISBN 9780719086489   Coercive confinement in Ireland puts the spotlight on the wide range of institutions used by independent Ireland to confine ordinary criminals and those who flouted the moral codes of the period, along with children and … Read more

Desmond Fennell and American left liberalism

Sir,—Desmond Fennell’s concern with ‘ideological contamination’ and ‘colonisation’ of Ireland (HI 21.2, March/April 2013, Letters) seems well placed. This has indeed been on such a scale that lack of comprehensive treatment seems explicable only because other events in recent decades, and reinvigorated interest in the Revolutionary period, have captured the imagination of historians more than … Read more

Tobacco-growing in Ireland

Sir,—Regarding the article on ‘Death and taxes: tobacco-growing in Ireland’ by Gearóid Ó Faoleán (HI 21.2, March/April 2013), which was most interesting, it may be of interest to your readers that the cultivation of tobacco was not confined specifically to the east coast. At the turn of the twentieth century and during the First World … Read more

Breaking the silence on abortion:the 1983 referendum campaign

An anti-abortion rally outside the GPO in the early 1980s. (Derek Spiers)
An anti-abortion rally outside the GPO in the early 1980s. (Derek Spiers)

The passing of the 1967 Abortion Act that legalised abortion in the United Kingdom (excluding Northern Ireland) was a source of controversy in the Irish Republic, where access to contraception was illegal. After 1967, increasing numbers of Irish women availed of access to abortion services in Britain while the debate about women’s right to control their own fertility carried on against a background of difficult legal cases. In 1981 the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) secured pre-election promises from both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to amend the constitution to ensure that abortion could not be introduced either by legislation or by the courts. Many Catholic bishops and priests spoke out in favour of the amendment, but all the other mainstream churches opposed it. Fianna Fáil backed the proposal, Fine Gael was divided, and Labour and the Workers’ Party and liberal forces generally opposed it, although all stressed that they were not advocating the legalisation of abortion.

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