Noël Browne, then the Labour Party’s spokesman on health, made a speech in which he suggested that ‘The judgment of the Catholic clergy on matters of sex and heterosexual relationships could not be trusted… It was long overdue that they acknowledge the understandable ignorance of men living celibate lives; that they were not competent to advise the rest of them in the complex matters of marriage relations… It is also true to say that consciously, or otherwise, many of them have chosen their celibate lives because they find the whole subject of sex and heterosexual relationships threatening and
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