There are very few unpublished thoughts. For more than 30 years, he has written a newspaper column once or twice a week, and almost everything that happens to him becomes important.
But there was one thing I never mentioned or even hinted at in print. It happened in his 1983, which isn’t interesting in hindsight.
I got married 41 years ago this week in a registry office in Dublin. In the 1980s, this was rare enough that it was worth writing about at some stage just to tell readers what it was like. Most people had no idea what would happen at a public ceremony. It was just a curiosity and a perfect topic for a column.
But I couldn’t write that column. The fact that we were married in an upper room of a solicitor’s office on Kildare Street, almost opposite the entrance to Leinster House, was not a matter of much publicity in our unfamiliar circle.
There was a very simple reason for this silence. My wife was a teacher at a secondary school run by an order of Catholic nuns.
Less than six months before our wedding, another teacher at the convent school, Eileen Flynn, was fired from her job for living with and impregnating a man to whom she was not married. . When she challenged her dismissal, the court enthusiastically sided with the nuns.
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In the eyes of the Church, the wife was living in sin because she did not sanctify the sacrament of marriage. When she became pregnant, in her employer’s view, she was pregnant out of wedlock.
Even if she had been an excellent and beloved teacher, the nuns would have been well within their rights to fire her. So she never shared her wedding photos with her close friends from school, for example.
I was reminded of this a few weeks ago when I read an interview in the Irish Times’ New to the Parish series. Horia Dumitra, a Romanian film director who moved to Dublin in 2018, says Irish people are “very open, almost oversharing… within the first 10 minutes of meeting them, you’re talking about your divorce.” It’s coming!” he said.
If we have indeed embraced a culture of oversharing, it follows from a history of undersharing. Remaining in Sturm was not a hereditary habit of the Irish, but an institutionally imposed one.
The year our secret wedding took place, 1983, a majority judgment upheld Victorian legislation criminalizing sex between consenting adult men “on the basis of our Christian nature.” It was also the year in which the Supreme Court’s decision was handed down. In 1990, one in three Irish respondents said in the European Values Survey that they “wouldn’t want a homosexual to be their neighbour.” Of course, many of them did – the point of the official crackdown was to keep them from knowing about it.
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1983 was also the year that the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, permanently banning abortion in Ireland, was passed by a 2-1 referendum. Amen. Ireland was supposed to be a beacon of morality to the world, but it was a strange kind of beacon, casting darkness instead of light and ensuring that thousands of Irish women who continued to have abortions did so in the shadows.
All of this made Ireland a contradictory kind of place 40 years ago. It was all talk. In Shakespeare’s words, the island was full of noise. I think it’s true that people talked more in public back then than they do now. There were no earphones. No one was listening to podcasts or book narrations. The chatter continued incessantly.
But so was the silence. The scene was on alert. Most gays and lesbians did not talk about their love lives or sexual identities, even to their closest friends and family. Even if the women who went to England for abortions were their sisters, mothers, friends, neighbors or business associates, very few people ‘knew’ them. And even something as mundane as where you got married can be a taboo topic.
These silences were filled with gossip and rumors. While Irish society enforced cheating and malignant shame, it also reveled in scandal. Wackyness was the most valuable conversational currency.
Still, the secret was kept. Much of the gossip was wrong. Many people were very skilled at keeping large parts of their lives to themselves, or at least within a very narrow circle of protective complicity. Much of the energy of Irish plays and novels was generated by the way they functioned as spaces in which the untold could be expressed.
But these evasive maneuvers came at a cost. There was also the personal cost of having to live a lie. There was a social cost to maintaining a society where the official image and private reality were completely disconnected.
So we should be very happy to live in a more open society. However, this joy comes with two conditions.
One is that secrecy can be even more harmful when disclosure is supposed to be the norm. The consolation of old Ireland was that most people knew that most people had secrets. It was natural to hide it.
Hiding can feel even more isolating now that we’re in a culture where everyone wants to appear vulnerable. For example, we know that most people who suffer from domestic violence still remain silent about it. The internalized shame has not gone away.
Another is that our culture oscillates between two extremes. Have we gone from a state of insufficient openness to “information overload”? In the age of selective social media, we may have replaced the psychological dangers of too much privacy with the psychological dangers of too much exposure. Letting everything out is just as harmful to yourself as keeping everything inside.