An Irishwoman's Diary

‘IT’S disgraceful – women without a ring on their fingers asking for contraceptives to be handed out!” It may sound like a Mario Rosenstock Gift Grub radio clip for International Women’s Day, but these were the actual words of former Fine Gael TD and Galway city mayor Fintan Coogan, Snr. The place was Galway, the time was the mid-1970s, and the issue was reproductive rights.

The controversy has been recalled in the current issue of History Ireland, complete with interviews with some of the main participants. The author, NUI Galway lecturer Dr John Cunningham, describes it as a tussle between the forces of the lay Catholic organisation Opus Dei and the "Stickies", the Marxist-influenced republican wing, Official Sinn Féin. Among the dramatis personae were current Labour Party president Michael D Higgins, then a lecturer, his current party leader Eamon Gilmore, then a student, and a number of prominent residents including Fianna Fáil mayor Mary Byrne.

Senator Higgins, as he was then, had supported Mary Robinson’s 1974 Family Planning Bill. His political rivals on Galway Corporation responded by passing a resolution condemning contraception, which in turn resulted in a picket by the student-based branch of Irishwomen United. This aroused deputy Coogan’s ire, but it was not enough to halt the establishment of the city’s first family planning association.

The initiative in late 1975/early 1976 was supported by staff and medical students of what was then known as University College Galway (UCG), and the first committee was chaired by a recent college graduate and Official SF supporter, Michael Conlon. The first salvo was fired when the college students’ union nominated the new Galway Family Planning Clinic as the beneficiary of its rag week activities in 1976.

“Outrage followed,” Cunningham says, with 50 local residents headed by Mayor Mary Byrne writing a public letter to the union asking if students’ lives were to be “ruled by sensuality without responsibility”. All three local papers also carried editorials criticising the rag week allocation.

In a leading article entitled "Sex and the single student", the Galway Advertiserclaimed that student activists had political connections. "Certain hardliners within the students' union have almost a fixation on what they define as 'family planning'," it said, referring to "tiny political groupings" – an allusion to support for Official SF by a number of student union officer-holders, including then president Johnny Curran and Eamon Gilmore.

The Connacht Sentinelnoted that "adolescence and a seat in a university lecture hall do not give people qualifications to determine the case for or against family planning". And so, when he arrived on campus on the morning of February 16th, 1976, Johnny Curran was confronted by student nuns and religious brothers who sought an emergency general meeting to rescind the rag week vote. They secured the necessary number of signatures during the day with the support of student Fine Gaelers, then "principal campus rivals" of the "Stickies".

Two days later, February 18th, 1976, over 1,000 students debated resolutions in the college concourse aimed at transferring the rag week allocation from the new family planning clinic to the Samaritans charity. The discourse took over three and a half hours, and the vote was narrow enough. Some 417 students voted to give the monies to the Samaritans, while 379 supported the original decision.

Interviewed by Cunningham, the then student union treasurer Paul O'Sullivan believed Opus Dei had co-ordinated the opposition to the allocation, and he recalled negotiating with a representative of the lay grouping on the wording of the February 18th resolution. Independent student newspaper Unityled its next issue with the front-page headline "Opus interruptus", complete with photograph of student union president Johnny Curran and fellow "student prince" Eamon Gilmore behind him.

Undeterred, the Galway Family Planning Association held its first public event in the Ardilaun Hotel on April 3rd, 1976. The Galway Advertiserreport estimated attendance at about 100, describing those present as "youngish" people, with men "sporting fine beards" and "ladies looking friendly and idealistic". There were also a small number of opponents, including Deirdre Manifold, convenor of a public rosary crusade, who, Cunningham writes, established a Billings clinic for natural family planning in her city centre premises before the new clinic could open its doors.

And finding one door to open proved difficult. Property owners in the city were reluctant to offer premises. One agreement with a landlord was “thwarted”, when an existing tenant, solicitor and prominent republican Caomhín MacCathmhaoil, said he was taking the additional space, rather than letting it go to the “politically motivated” leftists of the family planning association.

So a postal service for “contraceptive devices” was initiated by UCG lecturers Pete Smith and Evelyn Stevens, and engineering student Emmett Farrell, using two of their private addresses in Ardilaun Road. The leafy thoroughfare was home to prominent city residents, including the bishop. One opponent, Michael Heneghan, urged the residents to take action, to no avail.

Ms Manifold’s public rosary group convened in Emmett Farrell’s front garden, nonetheless, while a priest visited the parents of another member of the family planning group to advise them that their son was “spreading VD (venereal disease) all over Connacht”. In spite of all, the Galway Family Planning Association opened on Raleigh Row on July 21st, 1977, with Tuam GP Dr John Waldron becoming one of the first volunteer doctors.

Michael D Higgins, attributed his electoral failure in 1977 to the circulation of a leaflet by an “anti-contraception group”. As he told Cunningham, his critics acquired his canvassing schedule and effectively “sabotaged” his campaign by distributing its message in estates and villages shortly before he was due to arrive. It was only a temporary glitch, for he would become a poll topper (8,910 first preferences by 1992) and was happy to note at the long, long count in Leisureland, Salthill recently that the return of his Galway West heir, Derek Nolan, was a “vote for Michael D’s kind of politics”.

The clinic is still open, on Merchant’s Road, and some of the pioneers are still involved. Activist Jimmy Brick believes he knows why the campaign for its establishment succeeded. The difference between it and other items on the left-wing agenda back then was that “Galway people actually wanted contraceptives”, he told Cunningham . The opposition only gave them the information for finding same.