The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

It wasn’t until 1997 that divorce was legalised in Ireland, for example. It was illegal to be gay until 1993, a date that I always have to go back and check, because it can’t be true, it just can’t.

2018. It was the year Ireland repealed the Eighth Amendment and legalised abortion –

Watching in 2019, I bridled: why shouldn’t she have? Shouldn’t a woman be able to go wherever she wants, whenever she wants?

This throwaway comment made me think about how we judge women, how we are blamed for our own rapes and murders.

You can’t hide things in a country this size. Not unless people keep quiet. Which we have a lot of practice of, in Ireland.

I include this case to show how dangerous it is not to heed the warning signs when men hurt women. Almost always they will go on to do it again, and worse.

A fourteen-year-old girl had been raped by a neighbour, and since there was no abortion in Ireland and wouldn’t be for almost thirty more years, her family took her to England to get one.

Ireland has the fourth-highest rate of suicide in Europe among young people, and at least one person kills themselves every day. Northern Ireland currently has the highest suicide rate in the UK.

reason, like Eva Brennan’s, Imelda’s case was not included in the six that Operation Trace took on.

There were 155 women found buried there, but only death certificates for half of them, and many could not be named or traced. The Gardaí thought some of the women had died as recently as the late eighties. Thanks to several films and TV shows, such as Philomena and The Magdalene Laundries, the practice of sending pregnant girls to mother and baby homes is fairly well known outside Ireland.

The 2017 discovery of children’s bodies at one mother and baby home in Tuam shows that the nuns were not above failing to register births at all, and that standards of care were often shocking.

Interestingly, the special rapporteur specifically mentioned the ‘culture of silence’ that pervades Ireland. Both about the atrocities of the past, and the ongoing sexual abuse and violence against women.

the government felt it owned women’s bodies,

It says so much about how these men denounce others, while hiding away their own lovers and children, disposing of them like embarrassing secrets, and people did not take kindly to the revelations. It hardly seems a coincidence that the TV show Father Ted, which made fun of the clergy in a way that was affectionate but clear-eyed, began in 1995.

being gay was finally legalised in Ireland. It’s hard to believe this happened as late as 1993 but it did. But there was still a long way to go: a 2007 survey found that Ireland was the third most homophobic country in the western world. Northern Ireland was the second. In other social shifts, the magazine Playboy was finally allowed on sale in Ireland (progress!) and a referendum vote allowed divorce, finally, though it wouldn’t become law until 1997. Non-Irish people never believe me when I say this, but it’s true: you couldn’t get divorced in Ireland until 1997.

Ireland, where abortion only became legal in 2020,

I think it’s worth pointing out that the ‘eighth’ – the amendment to the constitution that banned abortion in all cases, and which the repeal campaign successfully fought to overturn – was only introduced in 1983. This led to the country having some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world; even though there was some leeway for doctors to perform one if a woman’s life was in danger, they often would not do so, afraid of prosecution. This was shown with the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland in 2012. It was an agonising case: she knew that she was having an unavoidable miscarriage and that she was dying too, and still nothing was done for her. She asked repeatedly for doctors to help hasten the miscarriage before she developed sepsis, but they refused, and so she died.

Since March 2020 abortion is now officially legal in the North, although a woman went on trial as recently as July 2019 for buying pills online for her fifteen-year-old daughter.

a country where shame lingers even more than twenty years later, where women still do not have equal rights, where homophobia and intolerance remain rife.

Ireland has changed so much since the nineties. But, nonetheless, it has not changed enough. It’s still a country that reflects deep hatred and contempt towards women, even as it worships them in the form of the Virgin Mary, the spotless mother.

I wonder sometimes if the joking is distracting from the pain. These women are gone – someone silenced them. They are a dropped phone line, like the one Jo Jo Dullard spoke into before she got into someone’s car.