IT HAS been a coffee and condoms revolution in Ireland. Yet how did it happen? We lived through it, were aware of it happening in a way, but only now can see its results: a country transformed, a culture and an identity revitalised and people who are not afraid of their own, sexuality - or more to the point, other people's. Almost as importantly, it was a country which discovered that coffee came from beans.
So what happened to the other Ireland - fierce, illiberal, intolerant - which had been so legally dominant up until so recently and which invariably served instant coffee wherever you went? Where did it go? How could it have vanished so totally, leaving so little behind of that old dreariness, that dark mediocrity, repression and, note least, that awful brown brew growing cold in old chipped mugs?
No doubt the fine fair hands on the tiller in Leinster House in the past decade would like to be held responsible, but in truth those fine fair hands, though for, the most part they reached maturity during the 1960s, did little enough to change laws to conform with reality. For Ireland, the 1960s provided a historical turning point around which we did not turn. The dreary de Valera legislative pieties which informed this State for so long remained largely intact. The liberalisation of sexual law followed not upon the pioneering challenges of our elected representatives, but simply through individual legal actions through the European courts, planned in attics over cups of instant coffee.
Ferocious Laws
The only distinctive, uncompelled act by any politician was Brendan Howlin's lifting of the restriction on the sale of condoms - even Maire Geoghegan Quinn's decriminalisation of male homosexual deeds reeked of the ancien regime, as it simultaneously introduced new and ferocious laws against prostitutes, to placate the bigotries of backbench hillbillies.
The fair hands in Leinster House cannot be held up when the question is asked: "Who changed Ireland?" Not them, me lud; not them by a long, chalk. We do not associate efficiency with government; we do not associate courage with those who run for office. But it has taken efficiency and entrepreneurial courage to help transform Ireland; and that transformation is to be measured not just in new restaurants and computer companies. The change is in attitude too - towards sex; and toward coffee.
Is it not quite astounding that there is more support in Ireland for contraceptive services and information than throughout Europe as a whole? Seventy per cent of Irish people think teenagers should be given advice on how to avoid pregnancy, compared with just over 50 per cent in Europe as a whole. Over 40 per cent of Irish people think that contraceptives should be supplied to teenagers, whereas the Europe wide figure is five points lower.
Two thirds of Irish people want sex education programmes in school, compared with the general European figure of under 50 per cent. Even in an area such as breast feeding, the decline of which was steepest in Ireland of any country in Europe, Irish people are twice as likely as their fellow Europeans to think advice should be available.
I am tempted to think that the change was not just Irish for all the Irish components in the revolution of the past decade and a half, we have been the recipients of two major changes of which we were not the authors - the liberalisation of world trade and the collapse of communism. Goods from all corners of the world have flooded into our shops and supermarkets, just as goods from our factories travel the globe.
Historical Forces
Possibly the collapse of communism meant that Irish people finally felt at ease in the world; it was not necessary to cling to ancient sexual motifs of identity. The world was becoming a freer and better place; could we not be freer too? Maybe historical forces do actually work in unsuspected and subconscious ways like that.
In 1983, nearly 60 per cent of Irish people thought contraceptives either should not be available at all, or available solely to married people. Bizarrely intolerant and illiberal as those figures were, they were an improvement on the figures for a decade earlier, when fully 33 per cent believed that condoms should be criminalised and another 42 per cent believed that contraception should be confined by law to married couples.
But when the later figures were taken in 1983, the old world was beginning to shift at its moorings. The very day that these figures were published, Yuri Andropov was elected president of that doomed entity called the Soviet Union on its way to perdition. Nobody then would have linked those two events; and maybe there was indeed no link, and quite by coincidence, Ireland and the world were changing in tandem. But I don't think it was a coincidence.
In the past decade and a half, the generation born in the 1960s and raised in the 1970s has come on to the labour market. It viewed the world with fresh eyes. It took sex for granted, and music, and travel. The world revolution of the 1960s impacted in Ireland not so much on the young of the time, but on the children they raised within familial minicultures of freedom, of enterprise, of opportunity.
Parents expected their children to discover sex in their teens, and cultivated no taboos for that discovery. These children were raised in households of foreign foods and in a television culture which admitted them to, and prepared them for the world. Simultaneously, Irish music and literature went from strength to strength. U2 were successful throughout the world and stayed at home.
Staying at home became the mark of success, and the crowning achievement of the emigrant was the return. And when that emigrant returned, he discovered many things had changed, not least the coffee everywhere, in country pubs and villages shops, people were drinking real coffee made from aground beans. The epoch of "instant" was over. And a few other things had changed as well.
Poll in 13 European countries by MORI for UN Population Fund, with the Irish survey done by Lansdowne Marketing.