The Salley Gardens

The impact of Celtic Tiger times

The Celtic Tiger term itself was initially used in the overarching spheres of economics and politics but slipped quickly into everyday discourse in the 1990s (Keohane and Kuhling 2004: 139). It provided a self-accepting ‘collective identity’ (ibid.) as Ireland entered into the boom time of tax-incentivized multinational corporations, export-led industries like the high-tech and pharmaceutical sectors, unrestrained credit expansion in globalized financial markets and feverish property dealing such as Ireland had never seen before. The ‘collective moral force’ of the Celtic Tiger term was perfectly suited to the global neoliberal economy we welcomed as a society, and it was used to sway people into spending without limit, ‘into borrowing and buying’ (ibid.: 144), a game promoted by successive governments which did likewise until the economic collapse of 2008 (Allen 2003).

Until we understand the choices made in the course of Ireland’s final entry into the global economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the nature of contemporary Irish society is incomprehensible. Until we know why some were given a leg up into the roaring 1990s while others were kicked in the face, we won’t be able to come to terms with the coexistence of manic affluence and mean despair of boom-time Ireland. (O’Toole 2003a: 49)

Mass media and social media are awash with extensive coverage of the consumer habits, clothes sense, sex lives and often the chic motherhood of international celebrities along with anyone who attracts a following as an internet influencer. One way or another, Irish women must deal with what appears to be a principle of late modern life, an awareness of material consumption which appears to be vital to make sense of their desire to find out who they are and who they might become, how they present themselves and how they learn what to do as sexual beings. They must live with constant change as an imperative of this ‘consuming life’ which ‘cannot stand still’ (Bauman 2005: 3). One of the women we interviewed describes how this profusion of messages is received:

Bauman (2003, 2005) argues that for the individual this seeming fluidity has put paid to older social ties that constrained the body, especially the sexual body, within rigid conventions. This is not done without its own costs. The very fluidity of consumption, of what is new and ‘now’, contributes to the sense that the individual is always incomplete and is always yearning for what comes next, working to make better ‘choices’ to achieve that completion. This imperative also recasts the nature of intimate relationships. Bauman asserts that they become ‘mixed blessings’ in that they can ‘vacillate between sweet dream and a nightmare’ (2003: viii): ambivalence about relationships becomes a predominant theme in people’s lives. Amidst the welter of impressions of how a life can be well lived, we may be doing less than we realize to actively acknowledge and support the validity of women’s desires about their lives, most especially in relation to sexuality. Deborah Tolman (2002: 4) has argued that while ‘we are supposed to develop a mature sense of ourselves as sexual beings by the time we have reached adulthood’, this is a fraught project due to the ongoing social constraints, different to once rigid restrictions, but that are distinctively gendered in their impact. Young women still find it hard to fully articulate sexual desire as a healthy aspiration for themselves in a confident manner, and in ways where they feel they will not come to any emotional or other harm (Durham 2009).

Understanding constraints and agency for women

Contraception is often cited as the technology that gave women in advanced economies a critical edge in ending the most obvious masculinist constraint on the sexual body, namely the burden of unwanted pregnancy that had pushed so many lives into the shadows. Hera Cook argues that the availability of the pill meant that at last women could act on their own desires, insist on sexual autonomy and think of pregnancy as a ‘freely chosen outcome of sexual intercourse’ (2004: 339). This assertion has special resonance in Ireland. On the fiftieth anniversary of the contraceptive pill being released for use, Medh Ruane (2010) described how ‘in living memory’, there was a period when no contraception, let alone the pill, could be accessed freely and legally in Ireland and the reality of unwanted pregnancy prevented women from discovering ‘the passionate, joyous’ aspects of ‘women’s pleasure’.

Several family planning clinics were set up in Dublin in the late 1960s using a loophole in the law (Solomons 1992), and their existence helped to raise the issue more widely of gaining access to effective contraception. Gradually over the next two decades, state and medical opposition to legalising reliable contraception was taken apart. A women’s movement which had developed at two levels, locally with grassroots activism and special interest groups, and nationally, with the Irish Commission on the Status of Women in 1970 followed by the Council for the Status of Women in 1972 (L. Connolly 2003), challenged a restrictive legislative and constitutional framework in the courts. This took place alongside the country opening up to the European Economic Community with its insistence on equal status for women and men in relation to employment and welfare issues. The 1972 McGee case, which successfully overturned the 1935 ban on the importation of contraception and contraceptive devices, helped to break the control of a dominant male legislature on this aspect of women’s reproductive agency (Speed 1992; Murphy-Lawless and McCarthy 1999; L. Connolly 2003: 142–4).