Ireland was not unique in views on sexual morality

Sir, – In his reflections on Catholic Ireland of the past, there is one key perspective that Derek Scally omits: comparative social history (“We didn’t like the reflection in Fr Sheehy’s mirror”, Opinion & Analysis, November 7th).

As the French scholar Olivier Roy has written (Europe – Est-elle Chrétien?), in the recent past all European societies shared similar values about sexual morality, and the civil law differed little from the churches’ standards.

Ireland was far from alone in attitudes to homosexuality; as late as the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s administration introduced a prohibition against “the promotion of homosexuality” in British sex education (and in the 1950s, the British home secretary David Maxwell Fyfe declared he would “root out this vice”, encouraging the Metropolitan police to carry out “sting” operations against gay men).

Unmarried mothers and people born out of wedlock were stigmatised in Britain until the late 1980s (see Jane Robinson’s In the Family Way); and in the recent past both France and Sweden sterilised unmarried mothers as “moral imbeciles”, as mentioned in my book The Way We Were.