Sheep magazine archive 1: issues 3-9

and visionaries had been shot in 1916, and a
more pragmatic and conservative leadership
concentrated totally on the nationalist goal
of separation from the UK. The Irish Labour
movement decided to stand aside in 1918 so
as not to split the nationalist vote, and the only
woman elected was Markievicz.
However, the real change that occurred between
1916 and 1918 was that the Roman Catholic
church had finally come on board to back
the rebel cause. The church didn’t like radical
movements, and individual senior church men
actually condemned the 1916 Easter Rising. But
anger at the execution of the rising’s leaders
swung public opinion firmly behind the rebels,
and the Catholic church, ever pragmatic, quietly
changed its stance.
The church was by far the largest and most
powerful institution in the new Irish state that
would emerge six years after the rebellion, and
was determined to shape it. The first Free State
government tried in its first constitution to reflect a
pluralist state, but in Eamon de Valera’s 1937
constitution the church was given a special
position, and its social teachings were
enshrined.
Contraception and divorce were expressly banned
– and women were told to stay at home.
Article 41 of the constitution declared that the
state shall “endeavour to ensure that mothers
shall not be obliged by economic necessity to
engage in labour to the neglect of their duties
in the home”. This was used not to give state
support to women who stayed at home, but to
discriminate against women who went out to
work. Women public servants – doctors, nurses,
teachers, television producers – had to resign
because of their positions on marriage. They
might be re-employed in a temporary capacity but
at a reduced salary. There were always lower rates
of pay for women in the public and the private
sector.
This continued right up into the 70s, and a maledominated
establishment – including the trade
union movement – went along with it. I remember
arguing about women’s right to equal pay
with a prominent Irish union leader. “When men
with families get a decent wage,” he said, “I’ll
start to worry about equal pay for women.”
Women always had to wait. Even when the then
EEC insisted on equal pay in 1975, a government
that included the Irish Labour party put off
implementing it. It was only when the civil rights
lawyer Mary Robinson, who would much later be
elected Ireland’s president, told us all to write to
the European commission – and we did – that the
government was shamed into implementing equal
pay.
So as long as Ireland was isolated and
inward-looking, women did badly. As soon
as membership of the European Union
opened Ireland up to a wider world, the lot of
women improved. But what if Ireland had never
achieved independence, had remained part of the
British empire, had not become the confessional
state it became after independence – would life
have been better for Irish women?