Diarmaid Ferriter: Hypocrisy on Clare Daly’s Bill mirrors that of 30 years ago

On this day 30 years ago, debate began in the Dáil on the Health (Family Planning) Amendment Bill introduced by then minister for health Barry Desmond, a Labour Party minister in the Fine Gael/Labour coalition.

It was designed to move beyond the confines of the 1979 family planning legislation and allow for the availability of contraceptives, from certain named outlets, without a prescription, to those aged over 18. There was no shortage of impassioned speeches over the next few Dáil sessions, culminating in a tight vote: 83 in favour to 80 against.

That debate is often remembered for the speech of Fianna Fáil’s Des O’Malley. He said he could not vote against the legislation and famously declared, “I stand by the Republic”, a move that precipitated his expulsion from Fianna Fáil for defying the party whip. But he did not vote in favour of the legislation, choosing to abstain.

Passionate speeches

In responding to his speech, Desmond heralded it as “historic and courageous . . . the finest I have heard in the house in my 16 years’ experience”.

There were, however, a number of passionate speeches before O’Malley’s, including that of Oliver J Flanagan, the Fine Gael TD for Laois-Offaly, and the longest-serving TD in the Dáil when he retired two years later. It had been clear for a decade that Flanagan was not the type of politician the new liberal wing of Fine Gael, led by Garret FitzGerald, wanted as the public face of the party.

Flanagan consistently attacked journalists and his own party leadership for their pursuit of the “liberal agenda”, and his rhetoric became littered with increasingly farcical warnings of military coups if political parties did not “mend their ways” and return to “Christian values”.

He had been made a Knight of the Grand Order of St Gregory the Great by Pope John Paul I in 1978 and his son Charlie, the current Minister for Foreign Affairs, (who considered Oliver a liberal parent) maintained that the Catholic Church relied on him as an influential public figure who would defend traditional Catholic teaching on sexual morality and family values.

He certainly did not disappoint in that regard in February 1985; he spoke for more than two hours against the proposed legislation on the grounds that the issue “calls for dignity, understanding and a clear expression of opinion”.

Given his track record, there was hardly much surprise in Flanagan’s stance – he maintained the Bill was a further effort to “destroy the family as the fundamental unit of society” – but he also articulated a strong sense of the duty of public representatives when it came to following their consciences.

It was wrong, he said, for TDs to obey the whip if their “consciences tell them that what they are voting for is wrong and is not for the common good”. Despite his 33 years as a member of Fine Gael and 42 years in the Dáil, he was not sad about losing the party whip; that was insignificant compared to voting against his conscience, an act that would be “a contradiction of what I have always believed in”.

His conclusion was unambiguous: “No TD can leave his conscience outside the door.”

Silences

This 1985 debate was also notable because of the silences. There was no contribution from Fianna Fáil’s Dr John O’Connell, a TD since 1965, who was originally in Labour.

As a medical doctor and politician, O’Connell had been very vocal about the need to increase access to contraception and had initiated legislation for that purpose; with Noël Browne in 1972 he had sought unsuccessfully to repeal the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1935, that banned contraception.

He had also been scathing about the limitations of Charles Haughey’s 1979 legislation confining access to contraception to married couples and only with a prescription. But in February 1985, O’Connell, dutifully and hypocritically, obeyed the Fianna Fáil whip and voted against the legislation.

The events of exactly 30 years ago do not belong to a historic Ireland. Strip away all the verbiage, posturing, hiding behind declarations of unconstitutionality, abstentions and self-serving defences of the party whip system that were invoked this week in relation to Clare Daly’s Bill on pregnant women and fatal foetal abnormalities, and what is revealed is the same abundance of hypocrisy and absence of courage and honesty that have done such damage for so long to our political culture and the welfare of Irish citizens.

A number of TDs, on record as trenchantly supporting what Daly’s Bill seeks to make possible, voted against it.

Oliver J Flanagan insisted in 1985 that the increased availability of contraceptives would destroy the Irish family. It did not, but at least he had the honesty and independence of mind to vote with his conscience, and not leave it “outside the door”, the same choice that, to her credit, Anne Ferris made this week.