I have very few unpublished thoughts. If you write newspaper columns once or even twice a week for over 30 years, almost everything that happens to you becomes material.
But there was one thing I never, ever mentioned or even hinted at in print. It is not now an interesting thing, though it was in 1983, when it happened.
I was married 41 years ago this week in the registry office in Dublin. In the 1980s, this was rare enough to be worth writing about at some stage, even just to tell readers what it was like. Most people had no idea what happens at a civil ceremony. Mere curiosity made it a good subject for a column.
But I couldn’t ever write that column. I wouldn’t even say too openly in unfamiliar company that we had been married in an upstairs room in a solicitor’s office on Kildare Street, almost opposite the entrance to Leinster House.
There was a very straightforward reason for this silence. My wife was a teacher in a secondary school run by an order of Catholic nuns.
Less than six months before our wedding, another teacher in a convent school Eileen Flynn was fired from her job because she was living with, and had become pregnant by, a man to whom she was not married. When she challenged her dismissal, the courts enthusiastically sided with the nuns.
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In the eyes of the Church, my wife was living in sin, because she had not consecrated the marriage sacrament. When she became pregnant, she was – in the view of her employers – pregnant outside of wedlock.
The nuns would have been perfectly entitled to fire her, even though she was a brilliant and much-loved teacher. So she never, for example, shared wedding photographs with her close friends in school.
I was reminded of all of this a few weeks ago when reading an interview in The Irish Times’s New to the Parish series. Horia Dumitra, a Romanian film-maker who moved to Dublin in 2018, said that he finds Irish people “very open, almost to the point of oversharing ... within the first 10 minutes of meeting someone, telling me about their divorce!”
If we have indeed embraced a culture of oversharing, we have done so out of a cultural history of under-sharing. Staying shtum was not a genetic quirk of the Irish – it was an institutional imposition.
That year of our secret wedding, 1983, was also the year of the Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the Victorian laws that criminalised sex between consenting adult men “on the ground”, as the majority judgment had it, “of the Christian nature of our State”. In 1990, one in every three respondents in Ireland told the European Values Survey that they “wouldn’t like to have homosexuals as neighbours”. Many of them did, of course – the point of official repression was to make sure that they wouldn’t know it.
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And 1983 was also the year of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in a referendum by a two-to-one majority, banning abortion in Ireland forever and ever amen. Ireland was to be a moral beacon to the world, but a strange kind of beacon it was – one that cast not light but darkness, ensuring that the thousands of Irish women who continued to have abortions would do so in the shadows.
All of this made the Ireland of 40 years ago a contrary kind of place. It was all talk. The isle, to borrow from Shakespeare, was full of noises. I think it’s true that people talked more in public then than they do now. There were no earphones. No one was listening to a podcast or a book narration. Chatter was constant.
But so was silence. The place was wary. Most gay men and lesbians did not talk even to their close friends and family members about their love lives or their sexual identities. Almost no one “knew” anyone who had gone to England for an abortion even though the women who had done just that were their sisters, mothers, friends, neighbours, workmates. And even something as mundane as where you got married could be a taboo subject.
These silences were filled with gossip and rumour. Even as it enforced dishonesty and malignant shame, Irish society also revelled in scandalmongering. Scurrility was the most valuable conversational currency.
And yet secrets were guarded. A lot of the gossip was wrong. A lot of people were very skilled at keeping large parts of their lives to themselves or at least within very tight circles of protective collusion. A lot of the energy in Irish plays and novels was generated by the way they functioned as spaces in which the otherwise unsaid could be articulated.
But these skilled practices of evasion came at a cost. There was the personal cost of having to live a lie. And there was the social cost of sustaining a society whose official images of itself were completely out of kilter with its private realities.
We should be very glad, then, to live in a more open society. The pleasure, though, comes with two qualifications.
One is that it is possible that secrecy is even more toxic when openness is supposed to be the norm. The consolation of the old Ireland was that almost everyone knew that almost everyone else had secrets. Hiding was a norm.
Now, when the dominant culture is one in which we all want to appear to be unguarded, concealment may feel even lonelier. We know, for example, that most people suffering domestic violence still keep quiet about it – internalised shame has not gone away.
The other is that ours is a culture that has been swinging between extremes. Have we gone from not enough openness to “too much information”? In the age of the curated social media self, we may have swapped the psychological hazards of excessive privacy for those of excessive exposure. Letting it all out is as harmful to the self as keeping it all in.