This is a companion piece to Laura Kelly’s article ‘The IFPA youth group, the Adolescent Confidential Telephone Service and Sexual Health Activism in Ireland, c. 1984–90’ recently published Open Access in History Workshop Journal 98
In 2018, the Irish people voted by public referendum to repeal the eighth amendment of the constitution. The eighth amendment, which had been introduced after a referendum in 1983, granted protection to the unborn child, effectively outlawing abortion. Three years prior to this, in 2015, the public had voted to introduce marriage equality in Ireland. Both campaigns to repeal the eighth and promote marriage equality were led by grassroots activists, and the ensuing results seemed to suggest to the world that Irish society was changing.
In 2016, in the midst of this wider context of political activity, I began work on a new project on the history of contraception in modern Ireland. Contraception had only been legal in Ireland since 1979 for bona fide family planning purposes. Access remained restrictive into the 1980s and the law was not fully liberalised until 1993 when the Health (Family Planning) Amendment Act was introduced. This meant that there were no longer any restrictions on where condoms could be sold or supplied and no age restriction. As an adult, I had always had legal access to contraception and many rights that my female ancestors had not possessed; for instance, the right to equal pay, get divorced, and serve on a jury. Yet, my generation was also living with the legacy of restrictive laws and decades of Catholic Church influence.
Of course, as feminist activists have always reminded us: the personal is political. As a child at primary school in the early 1990s, I was taught the ‘Stay Safe’ programme which educated children about personal safety, a programme which I later discovered as a historian was deeply controversial at the time. The programme attracted backlash from conservative campaigners and a group called Parents Against Stay Safe was established to campaign against the introduction of the programme on the grounds that it would take away children’s innocence and make them suspicious of their parents. I recall the graphic images used in posters by anti-abortion campaigners during protests in my hometown in the 1990s. This was likely around the time of the X Case in 1992 and the subsequent referendums on the abortion issue that year. And, as a university student in the early 2000s, I remember the shame and embarrassment myself and my peers felt around contraception and the continued silence and stigma around abortion. Yet, change, while slow, had been significant. Feminist campaigners played a key role in the legalisation of contraception in the 1970s and in fighting for abortion rights in the 1980s and 1990s. And, following the death of Savita Halappanavar in my hometown of Galway in 2012, a new generation of activists was catalysed. I wanted to know what it was like for men and women of older generations, and to capture these voices before it was too late.
The 1980s is often characterised as a period of repression for Irish women and women’s rights more broadly in the country. Two tragic events which occurred in 1984 manifest this. On 31 January that year, fifteen-year-old Ann Lovett died at a grotto in Granard, Co. Longford, after giving birth to her stillborn son. 1984 was also witness to the Kerry Babies case, where a single mother, Joanne Hayes was wrongly arrested and charged with the murder of a newborn baby, ‘Baby John’, found on a beach in Kerry. The oral history evidence I had accrued illuminated the fear, shame, silence, and stigma, felt by many Irish men and women relating to sexual and reproductive health in this period. Given this and the historical context of the time, I was intrigued by the stories of activists who were attempting to change Irish society and attitudes in the 1980s.
One activist group was the IFPA (Irish Family Planning Association) Youth Group. The IFPA was established in 1969 and it operated family planning clinics in Ireland which challenged the law around contraception by asking patients to give donations. I first heard about the IFPA Youth Group during an interview with Christine Donaghy, who worked at the IFPA in the 1980s and 1990s as their Information and Education Officer. Christine played a key role in the Virgin Condom Case, where activists challenged the law on contraception by selling condoms illegally at the Virgin Megastore in Dublin. She was also involved in devising the Stay Safe programme. Another of Christine’s initiatives, along with Dr. Mary Short, a doctor at the IFPA, was the creation of the youth group, composed of young volunteers, who would operate a telephone line for young people with queries about sexual and reproductive health.
Young people in 1980s Ireland were particularly affected by a lack of sex education, illegal access to contraception for people under-18, and the wider repressive climate around sexual health. It is important to bear in mind just how difficult it was to get access to information on sex and sexual health during this period. As one of the volunteers, Gerry Curran, explained to me ‘Literally, there was no such thing as the internet then, so people didn’t have access to the most basic stuff. If they couldn’t read it in a book, or maybe if they didn’t have a telephone directory from outside their own district.’ Donaghy and Short believed that a telephone service for young people would help to address the urgent need young people had for information. The telephone service was called the Adolescent Confidential Telephone Service (ACTS) and was launched in November 1984. I interviewed six of the former ACTS volunteers and this evidence along with archival sources (such as the telephone logs of the phone line) allowed me to start piecing together the history of their activism.
The ACTS telephone logs highlight the many challenges facing young Irish people in trying to navigate sexual health. Queries often concerned how to access contraception, plus issues such as sexual transmitted diseases, sexuality, and pregnancy. They show a lack of basic understanding among many callers around reproduction, but also widespread fear and shame in relation to these issues. I was also surprised by the proportion of male callers (79% in 1986, rising to 85% in 1989) and the age range of callers; while the majority of callers were aged between 16-30, there were numerous calls logged from older married men and women asking for advice. The relief felt by callers to the phone line was also palpable in the telephone logs. As Cait McKinney has argued in her study of the Lesbian Switchboard, ‘the caring practices that transpire when a phone is answered are singular, even minor in a larger struggle, but they make social movement participation and service work matter in the everyday lives of individuals’.
Also striking was the level of emotional labour that went into the work on the phone line. The young volunteers sometimes had to deal with emotionally demanding phone calls, hoax calls, attempts at entrapment, and calls where the caller was masturbating on the phone. Yet, it is clear that the empowerment volunteers felt at being involved in this work, outweighed these difficulties. As former volunteer Miriam Watchorn told me, ‘it was nice to feel that you’re making a contribution and helping in some way […] Ireland really had to change and grow up and join the twentieth century and get over its Catholic, whatever, inhibitions and things. And there was a sense in which I was helping the cause.’
The phone line was not without challenges. The provision of sexual health services and education for young people has always generated controversy. As Caroline Rusterholz’s recent book has shown, the establishment of Brook Advisory Centres in major British cities to cater to young and unmarried people was often met with resistance and produced debate that giving young people access to birth control would encourage ‘promiscuity’. The ACTS was similarly disputed by Irish conservative campaigners but it also created tensions within the IFPA itself where some staff members were concerned about the involvement of young volunteers in sexual health services.
Although Irish society has witnessed significant changes over the last decade, international developments such as the overturning of Roe v Wade in the United States remind us that we cannot take reproductive or sexual rights for granted. Indeed, the themes that emerged in this study have contemporary resonance. Ongoing concerns that sex education programmes might encourage ‘promiscuity’ among young people, damage children’s ‘innocence’, or expose them to ‘harmful’ ideas are not new. They evidently have their roots in historical concerns around the breakdown of the ‘traditional’ family unit. In 2022, the Irish government decided to introduce free contraception to 17–25-year-olds, and in 2023 this was expanded to include people aged 17 to 30 years of age. However, the focus on female-centred forms of contraception, and lack of provision for people outside of this age bracket, suggests that the issue of giving access to birth control to young people remains fraught. Despite this, the history of the IFPA youth group is a timely reminder of the powerful impact that young activists can have and of the importance of activism which offers alternative possibilities and helps to challenge the wider social climate.