One day early in 1968, I found myself addressing, at Ruairi Quinn's invitation, several thousand students gathered in the Aula Maxima of UCD at Earlsfort Terrace. That audience - large, appreciative, well-behaved, even docile - was our native response to the events of May 1968 in Paris, the so-called Gentle Revolution. But outside the dusty lecture-halls and echoing corridors of UCD, another revolution was gathering strength: the revolution by many of the parents of those children against the centuries-old Roman Catholic prohibition of artificial contraception.
For years, it had seemed like an unstoppable movement. When Pope Paul VI suggested in 1964 that the church's rules on birth control would remain in force "at least until We feel in conscience bound to modify them", there was a powerful sense that modification was only a matter of time. The discovery and popularisation of the anovulant pill had, for many (and not just the bar-room theologians) fundamentally changed the rules of the game. Barrier contraceptives were still legally banned in Ireland, but the pill, prescribed by a besieged medical profession as a "cycle regulator," was the Viagra of its day, its side-effects at that stage no more than a dark smudge of smoke on the horizon. The Irish birth-rate started to slip, then slide.
In Rome, bishops, theologians, and the Pope himself wrestled with the problem. A commission which had been originally appointed by Pope John XXIII in 1963 and which was expanded by Paul VI sat, argued, and split. The whole question of birth control was explicitly removed from the debates of Vatican II because it was too potentially explosive, but the gagging order was only partially effective. The Council appointed its own sub-commission on marriage which was equally divided, but was at least more open to the experience of married Catholics. One Mexican woman, invited among other members of the laity to give an account of their own experiences to this sub-commission, brought the proceedings to a halt with her blunt question to the assembled clerics: "Your excellencies, do you owe your existence to concupiscence or to love?"
Far away from the Vatican, voices were raised with increasing urgency, as other lay Catholics in many countries bore witness to their lives in the real world. Thirty years on, it is difficult to understand the raw courage that informed the writings of the contributors to Robert Novak's 1964 book, The Experience Of Marriage; its language reminded one reviewer of "the cry of the toad under the harrow". For light relief - and, God knows, we needed it - we turned to David Lodge's gut-wrenchingly funny novel The British Museum Is Falling Down, which will probably now raise no more than a faint smile on the lips of anyone under 50. The scandal of 1966 was the angry resignation of Father Charles Davis from the prestigious post of editor of the Clergy Review, from the ministry, and from the Catholic church altogether.
By 1967, when the first post-Conciliar Synod of Bishops met, the battle lines were being differently drawn. The conservatives wanted a resounding re-affirmation of traditional teaching. Cardinal Suenens of Belgium and others, sensing danger, urged that no statement at all would be better than the wrong kind of statement. Paul VI, however, felt that the burden of five years of controversy and debate could be ignored no longer, and published Humanae Vitae in July 1968.
It is difficult to under-estimate the impact of the encyclical on the Irish Catholic psyche. Journalists, in particular, had for the most part assumed that the encyclical would announce a change. They were now summoned to a press conference presided over by John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin - the first such event at which he had presided in 28 years at the helm of the archdiocese - at which, it is probably true to say, our noses were well and truly rubbed in it.
The archbishop, as always, kept his emotions well hidden. But he could have been excused some private merriment at the way the tables had been turned on people such as Sean Mac Reamoinn, Louis McRedmond, T.P. O'Mahony and myself who, ever since the end of the Council in 1965, had been questioning the recalcitrance and minimalism of official Irish Catholicism. At the top table, flanked by his recently appointed press officer (and our former colleague), Ossie Dowling, he spoke briefly, and introduced the redoubtable Monsiegneur P.F. Cremin of Maynooth - still happily with us - to present us with an exegesis of the encyclical.
It was the press conference to end all press conferences. I cannot remember how long Mgr Cremin spoke, but it seemed like about a century. By the end of it, we were all well and truly winded, and the questions were perfunctory. The basic message was unmistakable and, for its defenders, unchallengeable: Roma locutus est.
Outside, the message sank in. Sales of the pill faltered; the birth-rate blipped upwards. By the end of the year, the Irish Ambassador to the Holy See was reporting to Iveagh House his obsequious assurances to Cardinal Benelli that the Government was not only acting in accordance with the encyclical's exhortations to public bodies, but had in fact anticipated them.
It was - although we did not know it at the time - almost the last gasp of the old order. Three years later, the Irish Women's Liberation Movement staged its tumultuous train ride to bring contraceptives from Belfast to Dublin, and Mary Robinson's bill to liberalise the law on contraception was refused its first reading in the Seanad.
John Horgan was Religious Affairs correspondent for The Irish Times in 1968