Contraception: Alison Healy records the struggle to make contraception legally available in the State
Controversy over contraception raged in 1973 as the young senator, Ms Mary Robinson, introduced a Private Members Bill to free up the availability of contraception.
Up to then, it had been illegal to import contraceptives for personal use. The Bill was the second such measure to come before the Senate within a short period of time and it generated volumes of letters of protest to the taoisigh who held office in that year, Fianna Fáil's Mr Jack Lynch, and later Fine Gael's Mr Liam Cosgrave.
Mr Lynch's private secretary responded to one such letter, saying no decision had been taken to change the law on contraception.
"In considering any case that might be made for a change in this law, the Taoiseach, would, of course, have regard to several factors among them the claim that that State should not legislate in the field of private morality, and, on the other hand, the social implications of any change in the law."
Later that year, the Irish Family League urged Mr Cosgrave to uphold the existing laws on contraception. They were "good laws, and would save us from the permissive moral decline, current all around us if fully enforced," Ms Mary Kennedy, Irish Family League secretary, warned.
The public was not attuned to accept any change in the law "and the shock waves will be far- reaching, more far-reaching than you would judge from the media, where dissenting voices are well censored," Ms Kennedy continued.
A married couple wrote to Mr Cosgrave in November, complaining about the "insidious effort" to change the laws. "It is not the thinking people of Ireland who are behind it but the spokesmen who, as far as we can see, want to enslave the Irish people. We have nothing to gain by making Ireland a nation where uncontrolled drugs and devices reduce people to below the level of animals."
From Mayo, a concerned mother noted the Cork branch of Mná na hÉireann had condemned artificial contraception. She asked if Ms Robinson had stopped to think of the "disastrous effect" of contraceptives in countries where they had been introduced.
The Bill subsequently failed, but a Supreme Court ruling on the McGee case in December 1973 found that a law forbidding the importation, sale or advertising of contraceptives violated constitutional protections for privacy in marital affairs.
In what became known as the "Irish solution to an Irish problem", the 1979 Health (Family Planning) Act allowed for the sale of contraceptives, but only to married couples with medical prescriptions.
In June 1973, a Ms Mary Anne Lynch with a London address but originally from Cork, took the then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr Garret FitzGerald, to task for his views on contraception and other ethical issues.
Raising the question of the need for contraception in the case of a hypothetical mother expecting her 15th child, Ms Lynch offered the following suggestion: "Surely someone could provide this poor woman (if she exists) with a strong lock for her bedroom door and the material for a den in the attic, which could be built by her 15 children for their father."
Referring to the suggestion that the introduction of contraception would help the Northern Ireland situation, she said: "The reason the Protestants want this legislation is that they are well aware that it will become an effective instrument for a reduction in the growth of the Catholic population."