The past may have many interpretations, but everyone will agree that the Ireland in which I grew up during the 1940s and 1950s was most definitely a different country.
It was a land where marriages never ended, so no child ever feared that a parent would walk away. But this did not necessarily mean it was a land of happy marriages; many of them endured in cold hostility for decades. It was a country where you would as soon walk naked down the street as be known not to attend Mass. But despite the huge numbers of people who filled the Catholic churches every Sunday, it was not at all clear whether they were there because their faith was strong or their fear of public disapproval of heathens was stronger.
There were always jokes about the Irishmen who would climb over the bodies of 10 naked women to get to a pint of Guinness, but they weren't very funny jokes. The drink culture, if it may be described as such, was not shared between men and women. Men went to pubs to escape the tyranny of family life; women went to pubs at the expense of their reputation, their good name and their marriage chances. Life for women since 1922 should have been joyful and optimistic, but too often it was blighted by the fear of raising a head too high over a parapet: a woman who called attention to herself was a woman who would not win.
This Ireland is the inheritance of the five magnificent Mundy sisters in the film adaptation of Brian Friel's play Dancing at Lughnasa, which opened on Wednesday night. Through no fault of their own they are perched on the side of a hill in Co Donegal in 1936, five women alone against the world. They are all single, which was not as unusual in this country and in those days as it might first seem. All they have to take to Ballybeg when they go in to buy the groceries is their respectability. And even that is flawed: one sister, Christine (played by Catherine McCormack), has given birth to a son, an adored child, outside wedlock. That is something that would raise a lot of eyebrows in the Ireland of the 1930s.
They do enjoy the status of having an older brother (Michael Gambon) who has been a priest in Africa for many years, but even this honour is shown to be less splendid than it once was believed to be. It turns out that His Reverence has taken more from the hot African skies than he ever brought there, that he is more moved and touched by African ways and gods than he was by the precious gift of an Irish-style Christianity that he was meant to be bringing to pagans.
What is triumphantly true to life in the film is the way these women accept the hand that has been dealt to them and live lives that, despite gritty hard toil and anxiety about the future, are still simple and joyful. The story of the Mundy girls - Kate, Maggie, Christine, Agnes and Rose - is one that was real for many Irish women of the time. They work the stony farm they have inherited from their mother and father, hoping that someone - a man - will ride into town and rescue them but knowing deep down, of course, that it will not happen. Life is always going to be defined by the fact that Kate (Meryl Streep) goes out to work as a teacher, that Maggie (Kathy Burke) and Agnes (Brid Brennan) dig the land, that Rose (Sophie Thompson) will be unable to look after herself and that Christine will always be pining for the man who fathered her son.
Why are the warm hearted, eager Mundy girls all unmarried and left to fend for themselves in a place in which women hold little sway? There are many explanations. More men emigrated than women; more men became priests than women became nuns, further skewing the marriage pool. There were simply not enough men around. And while Britain was torn apart by the first World War as Ireland was left relatively untouched, one effect of the fighting was that British women were freed to go to work. Irish women had to sit there and watch while their sons (and sometimes their daughters), and the men their daughters might have married, were lured away not by bugles calling them to war but by a different call, the lure of faraway lands that would provide a living that their own country could not. So, I salute the story of these staunch women, who have long gone unrecognised, and the world in which they endured.
That world did not change very much between the 1930s and the 1950s. It was as if time stood still for Ireland and only the courage and sheer good humour of the women kept the place afloat at all. It was a world in which a woman was ashamed to accept a promotion or a good job because it could be considered antisocial - the man who might have gotten that job and supported a family with the wage would now be forced to emigrate.
Only a very greedy and unstable woman wouldn't realise that. Women automatically resigned from posts in the bank or in schools. My mother, who married in 1939, gave up her nursing career the day that the engagement ring went on her finger. To have done otherwise would have been to admit to the world that the near-penniless lawyer she was marrying was not able to support her.
If Meryl Streep's Kate Mundy had married, she too would have left her teaching job, or else it would have emasculated her husband. As I grew up, not one of my middle-class friends' mothers went out to work. A home where a mother was not presiding over the cooking, cleaning and general policing of the children was as unthinkable as a home on Mars. And we were constantly told - at school, at home, in the parish sermon and by the kinds of articles we read in women's magazines - that it was good to be quiet and docile and not to appear too bright or questioning. Men liked to be allowed a bit of a swagger, a feeling of importance: it was only fair, because they would be the breadwinners, the decision makers, the people who ran things.
A woman who was considered her own person might just be left that way, her very own person without man or child - a terrible fate in a land where getting married was the eventual garland of laurels that we all sought. It was that or join the convent, which had a status of its own.
Becoming a Bride of Christ was a perfectly acceptable option. It was only if you were nobody's bride at all that you could be considered to have missed the boat. There was no dignity about being an unclaimed treasure, a single unmarried lady.
Perhaps the most touching and authentic aspect of the story of the women who dance at the Festival of Lughnasa - dedicated to the pagan deity Lugh - is how they cope with their sister Christine. To have given birth to an illegitimate child raised all kinds of shocking matters: sex before or outside marriage, and in a culture in which most people believed that God had put a primeval urge to reproduce his own species into males and an equally strong urge called Holy Purity into women - an urge that would allow them to resist temptation until they were within the bonds of matrimony. Yet the four other Mundy sisters love Christine for bringing the child, Michael, into their lives and enriching them so much. They are jealous of her passion for Gerry the Welshman, who so casually fathered the son, but they also understand why she loves him. He cannot sleep in the house when he comes to call - he has to sleep in the barn. But the sisters accept that Christine will go out to visit him there.
In the second half of this century, a hurricane of change has blown through Ireland, in and out of the cottages, through the valleys of the squinting windows, all around the rows of lower-middleclass houses that were the aspiration of the daughters of Ireland. And I have stood and watched it blow, taking with it so much of the old, the safe, the sure - and the seriously hypocritical.
These days, nobody is asked to leave employment because they do not pay lip service to the Roman Catholic religion, in which they may very well not believe. Divorce is on the statute book; civil marriages take place as a matter of form. I see second relationships being given a dignity that they were once denied. Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach, has a woman friend, Celia Larkin, who is honorably called his partner and accompanies him on all public occasions. This would have been unheard of in my youth. We now have an Ireland where, after Mary Robinson served for seven years, the fact that there is a second woman President, Mary McAleese, is taken for granted. And nobody dreams of saying that because they are married, these women should have left the job to men who need to support families.
Female politicians, lawyers, dentists, accountants and senior executives are the norm, as are female police officers, bus drivers and pilots. It is now of course illegal to discriminate against women, which might not sound like a big deal - but is a very big deal when you consider how recently these Irish women suffered from such an inferiority complex that even the thought of sueing under the anti-discrimination or sexual harassment laws of the 1980s was tantamount to ritual public suicide. No man would ever think of either hiring or marrying such a troublemaker in the old days.
Female writers? When I was growing up, the work of only two Irish women was in the bookshops - that of Kate O'Brien and Mary Lavin. Later, in the 1960s, Edna O'Brien crept in. Today Irish bookstores are full of the works of Irishwomen who have found their voice, as novelists, short-story writers and accurate chroniclers of their time: Mary Morrissy, Julia O'Faolain, Marian Keyes, Deirdre Purcell, Clare Boylan, Mary Rose Callaghan - the list is endless.
The enormous number of public houses in Ireland nowadays, for so many generations male-oriented, indifferent and oblivious to the other sex, now consult carefully the needs of their female clients. Well appointed toilets, carpets not sawdust on the floors, coffee and non-alcoholic drinks are readily available without gasps of horror. A full lunchtime menu with low-fat foods is available as well as greasy fries.
And religion has changed, too. A celibate clergy no longer lays down the law to Irish women, refusing them forgiveness if they practise contraception. Nor is the stigma of illegitimacy either a public disgrace or a legal term. The law recognises no difference in entitlement of a child born in or out of wedlock, and in today's Ireland, priests are so pleased that a girl has not taken the abortion trail to London that they positively beg the families concerned to support their pregnant daughters with as much love as they can. I have seen this total reversal from the time when it was considered right and proper to scorn and to avoid the fallen sinner lest anyone think you were condoning the sin.
In any case, there are far fewer priests and nuns around than there used to be. Vocations have died down; the voice of God is apparently not heard calling boys and girls as it used to be. So monasteries, abbeys and convents are being sold off by estate agents for hotels and private development.
Some of this, but by no means all of it, has had to do with the much publicised scandals in the church. A land where once no one would dare to criticise a cleric has become a place where paedophile prosecutions have included the clergy, where a bishop has had to own up to a love child and where the young don't feel that there has to be a purely automatic respect for the Roman collar. But because the element of forcible conformist religion seems to have gone and been replaced by the possibility of genuine choice, those who do sincerely want to practise their faith can get much more satisfactory answers from a caring clergy who have long abandoned the arrogance they maintained until three decades ago.
It is a joy to see a movie like Dancing at Lughnasa because it makes us Irish women realise what a long and triumphant journey we have taken. If those Mundy sisters had lived in the 1990s rather than the 1930s, they could have conquered the world.
This article first appeared in the New York Times