1984 Revisited: Teen girl’s death in a graveyard lifted lid on Ireland’s hypocrisy
1984 was another year when history was scrawled across the bodies of women. Of four young women, in particular.
But it was the pitiful deaths of 15-year-old schoolgirl Ann Lovett and her baby, Patrick, in January, that dominated.
Her death, from haemorrhage and shock, his, from strangulation by the umbilical cord as his mother, still in her school uniform, struggled to give birth, alone, in freezing wind and rain, in a grotto in Granard, Co Longford, came to symbolise everything that was wrong here: A country that had swapped centuries of brutal colonialism for rule by the ‘celibate, clerical elite’ of the Catholic Church, where sex was the sin. Women were responsible.
Repression of normal bodily joys, denial, secrecy, religiosity, and hypocrisy made ‘damaged cowboys’ of us all. If we couldn’t have fun, then sure as hell our wives, children, siblings, neighbours, employees, couldn’t have fun, either.
And if the powerful among us decided to go ahead and have fun anyway, it was stolen, abusive, violent. Girls and women the victims.
Ann Lovett’s death blew this Ireland apart.
Emotionally in turmoil after a furiously divisive battle over the 8th Amendment, we were confronted with the brutal consequences of zero sex education, zero access to contraception for those most in need of it, i.e, the young, and a culture that denied the reality of sex, never mind sexual abuse, rape, and incest.
Astonishingly, in response to Ann Lovett’s tragic end, the town she lived in, closed like a fist. An enforced silence descended. Because, apparently, nobody knew she was pregnant. Nobody.
Anyone who questioned the narrative was run out of town. The media were ‘locusts’, ‘barbarians’.
The news broke. Gay Byrne, reviewing the papers, read: "Young girl dies after giving birth in field. Goodness me." Throwing the paper aside, he added: "Nothing terribly exciting there."
He couldn’t have been more wrong. Over the following weeks, thousands of women wrote in to RTÉ.
They knew ‘exactly’ the extremes to which Ann Lovett had been driven: Pregnant, unmarried, young, innocent, shamed, blamed, and alone, alone, alone.
Her death was the beginning of our coming to terms with how we treated ‘unmarried’ girls and women. And their babies.
Mary Raftery’s documentaries exposing violence and sexual abuse within religious-run institutions were a decade away, Catherine Corless’s grim discovery of 800 little bodies buried in sewer pits at Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home was 30 years away, but the imposed seal of silence, the gag on truth, was fatally weakened.
Weakened, but not demolished. Shamefully, the repression of truth wasn’t just one town’s omerta. It went to the highest levels of Church and state.
And still holds.
Another young woman of 1984, who didn’t lose her life, but lost her "son, her personhood, her job, her freedom, everything I possessed", was a 22-year-old Garda Majella Moynihan.
Put into an orphanage at 18 months after the death of her mother, later an institution where beatings were routine, she became pregnant with a fellow Garda.
The top brass went apeshit. But only at her. Under unrelenting pressure by gardaí, and Church, she gave up her son, was not even allowed hold him, then, alone and deeply traumatised, faced a Garda tribunal.
Her lover denied responsibility, suggested she’d had ‘other men’, was given a €90 fine, and ran.
She was "torn apart by misogynistic bastards".
The gardaí — forced by the Machiavellian intervention of a bishop: "If you fire her, it will open the gates to England" ie. abortion — kept her, but on sufferance.
“They degraded me so low,” she wrote, “I don’t know how I ever got back up.”
Sexually assaulted — well, she was obviously ‘a fallen woman’ so why not? — never promoted, isolated, and shamed, she began drinking heavily and tried to take her own life on five occasions.
A documentary about her mistreatment, and a hugely successful book written with documentarian Aoife Kelleher, brought an apology: 37 years later. The legal bosses promised a swift result for her legal case.
No prizes for guessing the outcome. Yup, it still drags on. And on.
Oh, Ireland.
Another young woman ‘torn apart by misogynistic bastards’ made 1984 headlines for weeks: Joanne Hayes.
Joanne gave birth to a stillborn baby boy.
The gardaí walloped a ‘confession’ out of Joanne and members of her family that they’d strangled and hidden the baby; then the gardaí decided she was also the mother, and killer, of a dead baby found 80 miles away on a beach in Cahirciveen. ‘Heteropaternal superfecundation’, don’t you know?.
Their treatment of Joanne and her family was so off the wall that a tribunal of inquiry was set up.
Carloads of senior counsel, barristers, solicitors, and ‘experts’ descended on Tralee.
Far from inquiring into the savage treatment meted out to Joanne and her vulnerable family, the legal bigwigs put this "slip of a girl" through weeks of questions: What size was her vagina dilated to during birth?
Where had she had sex with her lover? Was she "in love" or did she just love what men were prepared to do with her?
A misogynist’s feast. It took the State 36 years to apologise.
All of these crucifixions in an Ireland where there was no divorce, no abortion, no sex education. Where contraception, even basic condoms, could only be purchased, with a doctor’s prescription and from a chemist, ‘for bona fide family planning’ reasons.
Where marital rape was not a crime, homosexuality was a crime, where single mums and their babies could be chucked out of council houses just because they were single mums, where a husband could still sell the marital home and keep the money, where the newly opened Rape Crisis Centre in Cork was considered "too extreme" and raided by the Special Branch, where pregnant, unmarried women were pushed into mother-and-baby homes, 97% of them forced to give up their babies for adoption. A Church where the pope exhorted priests everywhere to ‘become eunuchs’ for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.
An Ireland where beating up your wife signalled she was "a nag" Beating and raping a stranger signalled she, or he, was "asking for it". Where making an unmarried girl pregnant meant she was a "slag".
Where schoolgirl contemporaries of Ann Lovett said they wouldn’t dare use contraceptives. It would make them seem ‘too calculating’.
Ah, yes, the good old days.
Of course, there were some jolly happenings, too.
Bob Dylan played at Slane. So did Van the Man. A Woman’s Peace Camp in the Phoenix Park, and 10,000 noisy lefties, protested Ronald Reagan’s visit here.
Not one single bishop, including Eamon Casey, attended Reagan’s official knees-up, in protest at his support for US-backed murders in Central America. Michael D Higgins and Tomas MacGiolla walked out of the Dáil during his address. And the brilliant, young Dunnes Stores workers continued their strike against apartheid South Africa by boycotting South African goods.
A new Ireland was coming alive. Most important of all, my darling daughter was born: On Valentine’s Day 1984. A gift direct from Cupid.
And not a misogynistic bastard in sight.
Hurray! HURRAY!