Progress and the lack of it

Current Affairs: When I first joined RTÉ, my more experienced colleagues on the News at 1.30 were decent to me. I was quickly given interviews with senior ministers and even with the taoiseach. Then I discovered that the three men who had been hired along with me were being paid more.

When I asked the personnel department why, I was told it was because I had come from a provincial paper and had "no metropolitan experience". When it was pointed out that two of the four of us, one English, one American, had also come from provincial papers, the powers-that-be were embarrassed. After my editor protested and the NUJ threatened to strike, RTÉ caved in. But they hadn't taken it out on me because I was a woman, they insisted; just because I was a culchie.

It's so easy to forget now that discrimination against women was automatic. They did it without even thinking - because they could. And women who persisted with a career were hobbled no matter what their hard-won qualifications. For instance, women doctors who had public service appointments had to resign when they married and were hired back at half the price as "temporary" replacements.

That's how it used to be. Since then,women's lives have changed markedly, but so too has life for almost everybody in this country - and the biggest change is economic. Ireland can now support its own people. I didn't understand how important this was until I went through the second great wave of emigration in my lifetime, in the 1980s. Six per cent of the population of this country left. Whole Leaving Cert classes, whole football teams disappeared. I remember chairing public TV discussions in the late 1980s, in places such as Arklow, where mothers stood up and said: "I spend Christmas Day on the phone to Sydney and Boston and San Francisco because that's where my children are."

One said: "I don't feel this is my country any more. How can it be, when my children can't live here?"

And that's the joy for my generation. Our kids can find jobs here. Involuntary emigration has stopped. We are renewed by the next generation and by all those who to come to live and work here.

That matters to me because I'm old - old enough to remember the 1950s and the empty desks in my school after the Christmas or summer holidays and the explanation "gone t'England, Miss". Old enough to remember the abandoned houses of schoolfriends in the foothills of Mount Leinster. Old enough to be grateful that it isn't happening any more.

And that's the difference between me and Ivana Bacik. I'm old enough to be grateful for what has changed. She's young enough to be angry at what hasn't. I see high employment and an end to emigration as a massive improvement. She takes that as read, and chafes at the resistance to turning Ireland into a liberal and equal country as well as a prosperous one.

So while she claims to tell the tale of how Ireland was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, she effectively ignores the biggest story of all, the economic one. And that's a pity. Because it is economic change which forces social and legal change, and economic change which was the wind behind the long-awaited social and legal reform she documents, including the rush to secularisation.

That said, she otherwise achieves much of what she sets out to achieve. Her book, she says, is an overview of recent social and legal change in Ireland - and the lack of it - "from an unashamedly liberal, activist campaigning perspective". She starts by making the point that liberalisation is secularisation and traces the history of Church influence in education, in the health services and in the provision of social services, and sets out the position now.

Some of this is fascinating stuff. I never knew, for instance, that when the reform schools were set up, there were many more institutions for girls than for boys and that this was the case right up to 1969. In the words of Trinity academic Eoin O'Sullivan: "The production of docile females as the shock troops of a new respectable working class was integral to the mission of the Catholic female religious who operated the majority of these institutions."

Bacik lists the problem areas which still survive. She tells how difficult it is still to set up a non-denominational school in this country; how the rate of family change is not reflected in legal recognition of rights for non-marital families; how gay and lesbian couples are given very little respect in our system and how homosexuality is still referred to by the Catholic Church as "evil". I like the defiant slogan she quotes from gays excluded from the New York St Patrick's Day parade: "Two, four, six, eight - how do you know St Patrick's straight?"

She's good on women's rights and the gender pay gap; the lack of any law at all in the area of abortion and reproductive rights; and the whole legal situation as regards immigration, asylum, housing, disability, and the environment. She's a mine of information for people who want to know their rights (or lack of them) under the law. As a journalist, there have been many times over the last few years where I would have dearly loved to have had this book on my shelves and I can see it becoming an essential Irish handbook.

It won't alter the fact, however, that when I think of the great changes achieved in 21st-century Ireland, the image of the Intel Fab 24 building in Leixlip will loom as large as the hallowed halls (albeit at the liberal end) of the Law Library.

• Olivia O'Leary is a journalist and broadcaster, and author of Politicians and Other Animals, just published by O'Brien Press