Perhaps, had Mary Harney had warning of the question, she would have phrased herself differently when asked about sexually active11-year-old girls.
It makes little difference. We all know there's no right answer to the question of how to cope with a child whose precocious sexual instincts are beyond the power of her immature personality to control. Thus these totemic girls are a perfect example of what happens when we throw taboos about sexual conduct out of the window, without knowing what we are going to replace them with.
For in liberal, post-Christian Ireland, we have destigmatised sex, and no longer declare any personal behaviour to be intrinsically wrong. The possession of a personal moral order is virtually unacceptable: we certainly would not dare tell an 11-year-old girl that it is "sinful" to have sex, even if we thought it might prevent her from having intercourse. It is an interesting sense of priority - for in effect, we prefer her to be pregnant than to have a troubled conscience.
In Britain, where intolerant and dogmatic liberalism has long been the Established Church, Victoria Gillick became a figure of official hilarity for attempting to prevent the state's provision of abortion and contraceptives to girls without parental knowledge. The state had become mother, counsellor, condom-supplier, pill-dispenser, and when all that failed, abortionist, to under-age teenagers.
And Britain probably prides itself on being a post-taboo society. It is not of course; taboos exist in all societies, for originally useful if later forgotten reasons, though often becoming irrational in form and cruel in application. The taboo on sexual activity by the unmarried was created to ensure social and economic harmony in all European societies. But it reached a truly deviant, vicious form in this country, almost becoming a defining characteristic of Irishness. We didn't literally kill our unmarried mothers, but we did metaphorically: we created cruel rituals of exclusion and punishment which placed them beyond the Pale of ordinary humanity.
The pathological Irish terror of the carnal was certainly a legacy of the Famine, and it is one we seem finally to have banished. However, we have apparently replaced that taboo with at least one other, one which protects the feminist agenda. Who would publicly dare to declare that stay-at-home mothers are better mothers than working mothers? The point is not the rightness of the argument, but whether one may even publicly make it.
It was ever thus. Synge was attempting to explore the shallowness of the peasant taboo on murder among the Irish peasantry in The Playboy of the Western World. Unintentionally, however, he touched upon the real taboo in Irish life with his use of the word "shift", triggering Abbey riots every night. Moreover, we know that if the hero had been playboy enough to get Pegeen Mike pregnant, the truly prevalent taboo would have prevented the play from ever being staged.
In my distant, more liberal days, I believed that if young people had proper sex education, all would be well: they would learn to have sex in a proper and mature way, and in due course would grow into enlightened, sexually responsible adults. But of course, this is utter rubbish. If youngsters are indifferent to learning generally, why should they be interested in sex education? They might be interested in sex, but that's a different matter entirely. You can take a bunch of 13-year-old boys and give them computer games, and they will play with them avidly: try to teach the boys about electronics, and pretty soon you're talking to a bunch of comatose youngsters.
Equally, the details of sex, like any other "interesting" subject, are actually quite boring: fallopian tubes, monthly cycles, testes, ovulation, yawn yawn, go on Miss, get on to the good bit - sexual intercourse, orgasms, and so on. But sex is not the possession of just a few travellers flying first class who don't need to pilot the plane; most people can fly first class sexually, and the consequences of indulging in it during your teenage years can cause you to fly the aircraft of your life into the ground.
We now all know about the sexualisation of childhood, though we might retain some perspective about how "new" it supposedly is. When I was 11, two of my classmates boastfully lost their virginities to one another. So sex has always been a feature of some children's childhood. The difference today is that sexuality is everywhere, and is part of the unwritten, unauthorised - but nonetheless authorising - taboo-free consensus that governs modern childhood.
Yet we still have taboos witness our abysmal failure to deal with the self-inflicted realities of Traveller life or to question the triumphalist feminist agenda.
For taboos are the G-spots of societal anxiety: press them, and you have an explosion of emotion beyond all logic. And you cannot consciously create a taboo; it is the product of the unconscious group mind, and it is protected both by a vehement denial that it exists and by a perfectly lethal irrationality if you touch it.
Today, the very concept of "sin" is taboo. Post-Christian Christianity in particular shies away from discussing it. Is it therefore so very surprising, with conscience excluded as a moral guide to sexual conduct, that there are consequences which leave us dumbfounded and desperately reaching for the Dane: taboo, or not taboo? That is the question.