As with the film and novel, Small Things Like These, Eve in Ireland is a timely reminder, “lest we forget”, of that 20th-century reign of Irish-style terror whose yoke we’ve only just shaken off.
Author Ailish McFadden grew up in Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, influenced, like most of the population, by daily immersion in Catholic Church rituals and doctrine. In coming to terms with this, she has produced a succinct, absorbingly readable, comprehensively researched and referenced account of what’s been called “the Irish Taliban years”: that era of oppressive legislative, cultural and social control exerted by the church hierarchy, which inveigled itself into a position of dominance during the chaotic power vacuum preceding the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.
From then on, for much of the 20th century — with tendrils reaching into the 21st, given that full reproductive justice was still denied to women in Ireland until the abortion rights campaign finally succeeded with Repeal in 2018 — “independent” Ireland was essentially a fundamentalist, misogynistic theocracy that harshly policed sexuality, women’s fertility and the population’s freedom of thought, while systematically abusing thousands in Church-run, State-backed institutions.
The lofty equality ideals of the 1916 Proclamation were quickly jettisoned as the Irish political establishment abdicated power to the hierarchy’s despotism. Women and children — especially “unmarried” women and girls and their children, who were pilloried as “illegitimate” in law until 1987 — were particularly targeted and stripped of their human rights.
Caricature and the Irish: Satirical Prints from the Library of Trinity College, Dublin c 1780-1830
Eve in Ireland: Controlling and Silencing Irish Women, 1922-1972 by Ailish McFadden
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller: A beautiful, slow-burning novel
She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark: Punchy, funny and unapologetically perturbing short stories
All of this has been well-documented. What’s special about Eve in Ireland is that McFadden, on our behalf, has gone to the trouble of reading, watching and listening to the vast body of findings produced by historians, investigative journalists and official State reports, and channelled their key points into a short, riveting overview leavened by just the right amount of personal reflection.
Uniquely, nearly every page of Eve in Ireland is colour-illustrated with the author’s own superb photographs and artwork. These images play on the reader’s subconscious, strengthening the meaning and impact of the text’s words through powerful symbolism. They’re an ironic counterpoint to the church’s thought control and indoctrination, which it exerted through the very symbols that McFadden inverts.
This slim, beautifully produced book is one that I recommend everyone reads.
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