This year marks the centenary of the publication of Brinsley McNamara's novel The Valley of the Squinting Windows, which caused a furore and whose title became a byword for small-town gossip, begrudgery and double standards. The author's perceived transgressions in writing this book were numerous including the easy identification of the novel, as far as locals were concerned, with Delvin in Westmeath, where McNamara was reared and schooled, and its frank treatment of sexual matters. The controversy the book generated resulted in the school in Delvin where his father was principal being ruthlessly boycotted and copies of the book burned by those who had, in a phrase used in the book, "standing amongst the people". As McNamara saw it, those who vilified him believed in their right "to the consolation of romantic treatment", while a realist was regarded as "a morbid scoundrel or an enemy of the Irish people".
As the novel underlined, the aspirations and rhetoric associated with Irish purity could lie in stark contrast to the reality. Nan Byrne in the book was a “bad woman . . . a woman of shame” and hard words about her and the need to avoid her were “issued from the lips of God’s anointed”; words that “left red marks like whip-lash weals across her soul”. Pregnancy outside of marriage was “the disastrous condition in which she had allowed herself to slip”.
Men did not slip or fall because there were always women to blame in the Irish land of absolutes. We currently commemorate a revolutionary period that ended with great pessimism and an alliance between church and State that bespoke immovability and reluctance to acknowledge publicly the many shades of grey that bordered people's lives. One of that revolutionary generation, Ernie O'Malley, was more honest than most in acknowledging in his memoir The Singing Flame: "there was a certain hardness in our idealism. It made us aloof from ordinary living as if we were above it."
Absolutists and deniers
There were always those who challenged the absolutists and deniers. I was struck during the week by the image of the octogenarian Frank Crummey as he joined other grandparents, including Gemma Hussey, to argue the case for repeal of the Eighth Amendment. Crummey has spent decades as an "enemy of the Irish people", campaigning on behalf of the abused and the battered and challenging hypocrisy. Ironically, he was sacked by the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children because of his involvement in family planning campaigns. It is over 50 years since he went on The Late Late Show to announce "as I sit here tonight the Christian Brothers are abusing our children". Such was the audacity of that assertion that it was easier to dismiss Crummey as a maverick and crank. Hussey also spoke frankly about reality and when she demanded in the Senate almost 40 years ago that the law on rape be radically changed was told by another senator that many women "upset the biological balance of a man and then claimed they were raped".
The meeting of these wise grandparents on Tuesday must have been tinged with sadness as it was the same day that the indomitable Monica Barnes was buried; had she been alive she would probably have joined them; she certainly made it clear in recent months she wanted the Eighth Amendment repealed. Barnes had also made it clear in 1983 as a Fine Gael TD that the amendment was a terribly bad idea and it took courage to assert that. She predicted the referendum would lead to the “nastiest, most prejudiced, bigoted, divisive campaign” since the foundation of the State and she warned of the spectacularly flawed wording of the amendment and the medical, legal and human dilemmas that would ensue.
Selective solidarity
The year after the referendum, Barnes noted how the Kerry babies case and the treatment of Joanne Hayes were a reminder of the selectiveness of the “solidarity” expressed with the unborn and vulnerable pregnant women. There were also the men who were adamant in 1983 about voting in favour of the amendment but admitted privately to Barnes “if their daughter was raped they’d be the first to get her an abortion in England”. As Barnes saw it, this was evidence of the “double-value system here; a double-value society”. The following year, the death of Ann Lovett, brought so sharply into focus again recently by the work of journalist Rosita Boland and the testimony of Ann’s boyfriend, further underlined how eyes would be averted to maintain the absolutism. As poet Paula Meehan described it, Ann, under a statue of the Virgin Mary, “pushed her secret out into the night/far from the town tucked up in little scandals/bargains struck, words broken, prayers promises”.
It is surely time to confront the double values that the absolutism and squinting windows culture have allowed to thrive for so long at great cost to Irish women.