It was a Father Ted moment. I asked in my local south Dublin pharmacy for a contraceptive item for which I had a doctor\u2019s prescription. \u201cNot in this pharmacy,\u201d said the pharmacist, quivering with indignation. <\/p>\n
\u201cOkay, I\u2019ll go somewhere else,\u201d I said. \u201cDo!\u201d said the pharmacist, still quivering. It was 1983 \u2013 10 years since the McGee judgment had ruled that married couples had a right to import contraceptives for their own use and that the law stopping them was unconstitutional. It was four years since Charlie Haughey<\/a> had brought in his Family Planning Bill, allowing married couples to access contraception with a prescription. But the attitude in some Irish pharmacies, even in supposedly liberal Dublin 4, was still \u201cDown With This Sort of Thing\u201d.<\/p>\n The attitude remained in some quarters that contraception was criminal. Indeed, back in the 1970s, in The Irish Times library, I remember looking for cuttings about contraception to find they were filed under \u201cCrimes sexual\u201d \u2013 which was the stark truth at the time. It was a crime to import, sell or advertise contraception.<\/p>\n So it was in that context that Mary \u201cMay\u201d McGee, who died this week aged 81<\/a>, struck a massive blow in the long struggle to release Irish women\u2019s health from the stranglehold of Roman Catholic Church<\/a> teaching. <\/p>\n Firstly, with her fisherman husband Shay, she helped to move the debate about contraception away from the area of justice and into the area of health. <\/p>\n She had had four children, two of them twins, between 1968 and 1970. Having been unwell after each of the four pregnancies, May\u2019s advice from her doctor was to use a diaphragm, which required the importation of spermicide jelly. It was when customs seized the imported jelly that the case arose. <\/p>\n The legal battle fought by the McGees ended up in the Supreme Court in 1973. The court accepted their argument that they had a right to contraception on the basis of marital privacy. Senator Mary Robinson<\/a>, who was back then trying to introduce her own Bill legalising contraception, always stressed how important it was to move the debate away from the criminal justice area and into that of women\u2019s reproductive health and choice. The McGees had done that \u2013 never more tellingly than when May\u2019s husband, asked in court how he felt about his wife using contraceptives, said: \u201cI\u2019d prefer to see her using contraceptives than be placing flowers on her grave.\u201d <\/p>\n One of the proofs of that change of culture was that it was Haughey as minister for health who introduced the 1979 Bill limiting contraception to married people with a prescription, and Barry Desmond as minister for health who introduced the 1985 legislation that made contraceptives generally available.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Mary \u2018May\u2019 McGee: The dignified Irish mother who took on the might of the State and became a feminist iconOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n But there was something else important that the McGees had done. They had presented the argument for contraception within the context of a loving, equal relationship. Shay McGee feared not only for his wife\u2019s health but for her life. Anyone who grew up in those families with few gaps between babies had some notion of the stress it brought, particularly to the relationship between wife and husband. Quite apart from the economic implications of providing for so many children, there was the worry for couples of endangering a wife\u2019s health, and for wives the worry that their only control \u2013 refusing sex \u2013 would be seen as a lack of affection. The inability to have a healthy sexual relationship without fear must have been a massive strain.<\/p>\n The reform the McGees started so bravely came to its full legal fruition in 1985, when Desmond\u2019s Health (Family Planning) (Amendment) Act made contraception, including condoms, widely available and without prescription. <\/p>\n By this stage, the contraception debate had entered a new phase \u2013 the need to ensure that people not of the Roman Catholic faith were not saddled with Roman Catholic laws. Garret FitzGerald had already launched a constitutional campaign to make this State more acceptable to non-Catholics here and in the North. When Fianna F\u00e1il\u2019s Haughey, then in opposition, decided to oppose the new Bill, Des O\u2019Malley decided to vote for it. In what has since become known as his \u201cI Stand by the Republic\u201d speech<\/a>, he said that a democratic republic \u201cshould take account of the reasonable views of all groups, including all minorities, because if we do not take into account the rights of minorities here, can we complain if they are not taken into account … anywhere else?\u201d. O\u2019Malley was thrown out of Fianna F\u00e1il for his pains and went on to found another party, but there are many who will argue that that speech was his finest hour.<\/p>\n