THE 1960s has been described as a watershed decade for Irish sexuality, setting in motion a number of changes that prepared the ground for the profound alterations of the 1970s and 1980s.

There were many reasons for this, including more debate about contraception, the influence of external forces and the arrival to Ireland of television. At the personal level, many people were also challenging their religion and rejecting a teaching they regarded as conditioning them to equate flesh with sin.

This sense of defiance was captured in Michael Farrell’s book

Thy Tears Might Cease

(1963), when the character Martin Reilly, having been punished and humiliated by priests about his private feelings, decides to resist them, “and think what thoughts he chose in the solitude of his own heart”. If some anecdotes are to be believed, there was a certain lessening of severity: “At Maynooth they laughed rather than fulminated at the story of a Galway priest who had noticed a young woman from his parish sprawled on a beach wearing a very brief bikini. The priest sent the woman a note, asking her to wear a one-piece bathing suit. She returned a quick reply: ‘which piece do you want me to take off?’”. Nor should the degree of liberation be exaggerated. Many growing up in Ireland in the 1960s still found that sex was a taboo subject.

Sociologist Tom Inglis points out that Daniel Lord's pamphlet M is for Marriage(1962) does not mention sex, the implication being it was not seen as having any bearing on the success of a marriage. Ireland's best known agony aunt during this decade, Angela Macnamara, believed 80 per cent of the young girls who wrote to her would not even mention the word sex to their mothers. One Irish mother of nine children commented to Dorine Rohan, author of the book, Marriage: Irish Style(1969) "Whoever said you were supposed to enjoy sex? Sure, aren't we all here to suffer and the more we suffer in this life, the better it will be for us in the next."

Rohan's book, a substantial part of which had first been published in The Irish Times, was described (after its launch, which the Taoiseach Jack Lynch and his wife attended) as "provocative and probing", one that gave a frank overview of the internal dynamics of Irish marriage and was, in effect, "a concise compilation of much that has been said over the past few years about marriage in Ireland". It was also cited as significant that Rohan was neither a doctor, a sociologist nor a psychiatrist.

Donald Connery's book The Irish(1968) painted the following portrait of the Irish wife: " . . . a kingsize hot water bottle who also cooks his food and pays his bills and produces his heirs. In the intimate side of marriage he behaves as if he were slightly ashamed of having deserted his male friends and his bachelorhood. He takes what should be the happy, leisurely lovemaking of marriage like a silent connubial supper of cold rice pudding. A rapid sex routine is effected as if his wife is some stray creature with whom he is sinning and hopes he may never see again. Though many Irish wives are preconditioned to such behaviour, having seen its like in their own fathers and uncles, they resent it deeply." Within Connery's analysis lie some clues as to why things did change in the 1960s. More people were prepared to write about these subjects, and resentments that had been buried for many years surfaced and were aired.

But this did not automatically generate greater personal liberation and the broader context is significant here also. The tale of international attitudes to sex and sexuality is not simply a story of inevitable progress. While it is true John Updike's book Couples(1968) includes the exchange that seemed to define a new era of liberation – the female response to the man worried about contraception is "welcome . . . to the post-pill paradise" – the pill was only used by a minority of women in North America in the 1960s, and in the 1970s, 18 per cent of French couples still relied on the withdrawal method, while only 6 per cent of French women were on the pill in 1970.

John Ardagh published his book The New French Revolution in 1968 and argued that the transformation of sexual attitudes in that country was more laboured than in England, and that while for women "old-style anti-Catholicism may be receding fast in France," it left behind it "a widespread legacy of semi-conscious guilt, superstition and prudery about sex". Writer Alan Bestic confidently asserted in 1972 that England had "soared into the sexual stratosphere," but he also maintained that in some respects the English were more physically repressed than the Irish, that they compartmentalised sex, would not talk about it within marriage due to "fear, guilt and ignorance". They were coy about sex education in schools (only one-third of local educational authorities producing guides or handbooks for that purpose), and overall, the terrain of the jungle of English sex life was "tortuous, paradoxical, dangerous".

By the 1960s, the Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid was over 20 years at the helm, and though he detected the winds of change blowing in the area of sexuality, he was determined to reiterate the belief that Ireland was different than elsewhere when it came to sexual morality and practice.

This ultimately led to a siege mentality, which was summed up in McQuaid’s exasperated response to yet another query from the media. In March 1970 he wrote to Oscar (Ossie) Dowling, his faithful and often fawning press secretary: “I am very tired of RTÉ’s attention to Bishops and priests. I do not understand why they do not pay attention to the Army, the Law, Medicine and especially journalism; fruitful fields for investigators. They are not anxious to promote the Kingdom of God”. Herein lay the weakness of McQuaid in face of the changes of the 1960s; he was still refusing to grasp or accept the fact that sex sold, and one of the reasons why so many journalists wanted to ask so many questions was because the church (and McQuaid) were struggling with sexual issues, if not delusional about them.

In April 1965, journalist Tim Pat Coogan requested replies from McQuaid to a questionnaire he had asked him to fill in for a forthcoming book (subsequently published under the title Ireland since the Rising). McQuaid wrote to Dowling: "I shall not meet Mr Coogan; the questions are impertinent intrusions with my personal life or tendentious misrepresentations in several cases. Only yesterday the Bishops warned me that this man is going to write a flaming book of criticism." Nonetheless, McQuaid did draft replies to the questions, (which were never sent to Coogan) including the boldest one which read: "Is it fair to say that the Irish church is obsessed with sex and fails to concern itself sufficiently with things like poverty, lack of equal educational opportunity for all, the level of widows and orphans pensions?" McQuaid's draft reply was as follows: "No. There is probably a saner attitude to sex in this country than almost anywhere else. Family life is stable, women are respected, and vocations are esteemed. Sex, in the sense used here – illicit sex – is a sin and is the concern of the church. The other comparatives are not sins".

Coogan and others were well aware, of course, that this was a complete fallacy, and the myth that the Irish were the most sexually pure race on earth was beginning to wear thin in the 1960s. The response of McQuaid, which endorsed the idea that sex was intrinsically sinful (Coogan had not specified “illicit sex”) revealed much about the degree to which the church was struggling to cope with the great social changes of the 1960s, and the reiteration of its core messages about sexuality and sexual behaviour began to seem increasingly archaic as the decade progressed.

A Jesuit priest, Joseph McGloin, wrote a fictional narrative, first published in the US and subsequently published in Dublin in 1960, under the title What Not to Do on a Date, in which a priest, warning of the dangers of "imitating the junk that comes out of Hollywood" discusses "necking" and "petting" with two girls and two boys. According to the priest, "there is no such thing as a little innocent necking . . . necking is not wrong in itself. It is still not to be indulged in . . . as you perhaps know, necking can easily become a habit, and once that habit is established, it is only a short step to sin because, for one thing, necking alone will be pretty tame after a while. It is very hard too, to believe that people indulge in necking just to show affection". Girls, he insisted "get much better dates if they never even consider the idea of necking" and he spelt out the FEAR rule – "if kisses are Frequent, Enduring, and Ardent there can be hardly any just Reason for them".

Five years later, Father Thomas Finnegan, a priest of the Diocese of Elphin, published a pamphlet with the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, entitled Questions Young Women Ask, and was unashamedly Jansenistic in his assessment of how girls could know true love: "St Paul tells us Love is not self-seeking. True love is unselfish. To be unselfish is to suffer. Therefore to love is to suffer. Some of the pop songs say that as soon as love begins, suffering ceases. It is the exact opposite. A person who will not suffer will not love. No matter what he says".

He too offered sample questions from teenagers including the following: “I feel that marriage is really a sort of permission to be immodest. Is it wrong to be thinking that way?” the answer to which was “modesty is not a hard virtue to practice because God has implanted in each person an instinct of shame and fear to protect the powers of sex and the holiness of marriage . . . because of original sin . . . our bodily instincts are in revolt against conscience”.

It was also asserted that the male response to female attractiveness was physical, whereas the woman’s attraction to men was psychological.

Finnegan’s analysis went from its doom-laden main section to its blunt and negative conclusion, which was that passionate kissing was “mortally sinful” for the unmarried, and he came up with suggestions as to how the wholesome girl could keep lustful thoughts at bay: “Do not think about your ‘bad thoughts’. Say quickly ‘Jesus save me – Mary help me’ and then think of something else. If you are a domestic sort of girl picture to yourself the little house that you and your future husband are going to live in and decide on the colour schemes for the various rooms . . . or, if you are the athletic type of girl, pretend to yourself that an uncle has given you money to buy a car with. By the time you have decided between the relative merits of a Morris Minor and a Ford Anglia the bad thoughts will be forgotten.”

• From Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland, by Diarmaid Ferriter, published this week by Profile Books