Sir, Bless my soul, but Kevin Myers is surely master of the zany/outrageous/fantastical, in his hymn to coffee beans, condoms, and a brave new sexually liberated Ireland (March 21st). Now, how did I, growing up in the dreary years of the "De Valera legislative pieties" arrive at maturity at all at all, my self esteem intact? In that, dark nigh before the glorious dawn of liberal sexual laws - and the joys of promiscuous sex, so ably aided and abetted by the happy Howlin legislation on availability of condoms? How did I feel so at ease with the world apparently unlike the rest of my compatriots - living for a time as I did, in Godless, post war France, and still clinging to the "ancient sexual motif" of my identity?
I only know, as a woman, that in those ignorant, unenlightened years, I had never heard of hard drugs, never mind knowing anyone addicted to drugs, that I could walk the streets at any hour of the day or night, without the remotest likelihood of being mugged raped or murdered, that when I married, I had not the slightest fear of my children being sexually or physically abused or abducted, that I was not daily and nightly bombarded in the media by near pornographic images of women, with resultant lessening of respect for them, and violence towards them. Elderly people then could sleep easy in their beds at night. Many never locked their doors. In Kevin Myers's free, liberated world they barricade themselves into homes that have become fortresses of fear. Shop windows are barred with steel, against theft, damage and burglary. Hidden cameras watch for marauding gangs of drug crazed youths.
I can assure Kevin Myers that pre the 1960s Revolution, some us actually knew all about real music - not the caterwauling of some angst ridden waif, garbed in black, with a stud in its nose. We also know about travel, literature, good food, (even coffee beans) in short, about the finer things in life. So he can eulogise to his heart's content, the condom culture, with contraceptives for our teenagers, but he may live to see the "responsible" parents bred from it - the whirlwind reaped from this Brave New World - Yours, etc.
Cartronkeel House,
Moate,
Co Westmeath.