/ 26 March 2010

Sexing up Ireland’s history

Occasions of sin: sex and society in modern ireland
by Diarmaid Ferriter (Profile Books)

The 2009 Irish government inquiry into child abuse by clergy in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin was harrowing reading. Apart from revealing a string of cases of rampant criminality covered up by the church, often in cahoots with the Irish police and government, it exposed a side to the Irish psyche that many Irish (and persons of Irish descent, like me) may have preferred to keep hidden.

Beneath an apparent puritanism (of both Catholic and Protestant varieties) lurked, it seemed, a voracious, at times twisted, sexual drive. The report, investigating child abuse among Catholic priests in Dublin alone, presented its evidence clinically. It made no attempt to analyse deeper questions — why there was such a high level of sexual abuse in a country such as Ireland, for instance. This new book, although not a response to the Dublin Report, tries to do this.

Spanning roughly the mid-19th century to the present day, Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of history at University College Dublin, describes how sexuality in Ireland has always been a deeply contested area of life. On the one hand, the strength of the Catholic Church (and, in the north, of Presbyterianism) has given Ireland the image of social conservatism — no sex outside marriage, opposition to contraception, illegality of abortion and so on. But beneath the surface, Ferriter shows, there has long been a semi-hidden history of prostitution, illegitimacy, infanticide and sexual abuse.

He shows this by referring to court proceedings in a number of counties in both the south and north of Ireland.

For a variety of reasons, but mainly as a result of poverty and overcrowding in slums, the bigger towns and cities — and particularly Dublin — have had a long and fairly extensive history of prostitution.

In itself this should come as no big surprise: historians such as Judith Walkowitz (City of Dreadful Delight) have shown how the highest level of prostitution in London occurred during the puritanical Victorian era. What is perhaps more shocking are records Ferriter has found in small towns and rural areas — not so much of prostitution but of sexual abuse of children (mainly by parents), rape (including the rape of minors) and a high level of infanticide, usually by the abandonment of newborns.

Despite the conservatism of Irish society in general, influenced in part by religion, Ferriter shows how the Irish, particularly writers and intellectuals, have consistently challenged the dominant social attitude. From playwrights such as John Millington Synge in the early 20th century through novelists such as John McGahern and Edna O’Brien in the mid-20th century to present-day authors, there has been a dramatic and often controversial questioning of Irish sexual mores. Such questioning has led to a battle fought on many fronts: in the church, in Parliament, in the courts and ultimately, in the public square.

But the tide has turned in recent years, argues Ferriter. The puritan ideals have broken down; the power of the church has weakened. Economic growth and the rise of a middle-class society has lessened the number of infanticides considerably. Sexual abuse from whatever sector is being addressed. The paternalistic and patriarchal attitudes of the courts with regard to sentencing sex crimes has changed: rapists and child molesters are no longer being treated with what the evidence contained in this book shows was sometimes astounding leniency in the early 20th century. And the churches will no longer be allowed to deal internally with their minority of wayward clerics.

I hope this brief overview does not suggest that this is a Daily Sun-type exposé. It is easy to write a sensationalist “history” of sex and sexuality, but difficult to produce something that is thorough, well researched and respectable as a work of serious scholarship. Works such as Lawrence Stone’s famous The Family, Sex and Marriage in England are rare and hard to produce, but when they are, they pay mighty intellectual dividends. Ferriter has, I suspect, consciously or unconsciously, modelled this book on Stone’s classic. He certainly draws on many of the kinds of sources Stone used: court records, literature, memoirs and works of popular culture.

Such sources, of course, cannot simply be used as is. Any good historian (and Ferriter is certainly a good historian) has to carefully interpret sources — “texts” in their broadest, postmodern sense — and interrogate them to find out not only what was said but what is often left unsaid. And any text must be weighed against others: to what degree can court records, for example, tell us things about a culture?

They tell us a lot about criminality, what crimes were committed and by whom, when and how these offences were punished (or not, in some cases). They tell us how the forces of “law and order” perceived certain actions, what gravity they gave to them, sometimes even expressing the foundational moral and political values of a society (at least, a sceptic would add, those who run a society).

Similarly, how do works of literature — written, oral or visual — express broader sensibilities? One school of thought might say that the sexual preoccupations of the writers and artists Ferriter frequently uses to examine sexual mores in modern Ireland are precisely that — their issues; their hang-ups.

Maybe so, but in defence of the use of such sources, I would argue (as does Ferriter) that what may start as dissident voices may well become — through popularity — dominant in a culture, a point probably noted by the at times ferocious Irish Censorship Board and sections of the Catholic and Protestant churches.

Ultimately, perhaps, we are left — as with all history — with what is in reality an elaborate (re)construction, a work of fiction in the sense that all narrative and analysis about the past is a construct of the author’s imagination, read through various theoretical lenses, influenced by present preoccupations and events.

With the book coming out at the time of the Dublin Report, it is likely that some may see the real challenges of present-day Ireland “read back” into the past to interpret the existing documentary sources. This is unlikely in the present book’s case — nobody, not even with a horde of ravening researchers and gung-ho graduate students behind them, could put a book of this size together. Nor would such a work written on the trot be of such quality. A more holy colleague than I would call it the work of the “good spirit”.