The tradition of wearing new clothes and shoes to Sunday Mass before giving them a general outing is now largely forgotten. Well, at least it was forgotten by me until a dress caught my eye in the Way We Wore exhibition at the decorative arts and history museum in Collins Barracks.
The blue silk dress with a white lace bodice was made in the late 1860s by a local dressmaker for Maria Sweeney from Ballymote, Co Sligo. It was for her brother Michael’s wedding in Easkey. In keeping with tradition, she wore it to Mass the following Sunday so that it would be blessed. Unfortunately for Maria, it was not the joyous occasion she had expected and the priest was in no mood for blessing anything.
He criticised her publicly for wearing the gown and disapproved of the figure-revealing style, according to an information note accompanying the exhibit. I had to read that twice. The dress has a high, buttoned-up neck, long sleeves and falls to the floor. Even the most modest nun’s habit would reveal more flesh. According to the late Irish costume expert Mairéad Dunlevy, who was curator when the dress was acquired, the priest had also accused Maria Sweeney of “dressing above her station”.
His withering criticism was enough for Maria Sweeney to never wear the beautiful dress again. Of course, men have been policing women’s clothes since Adam looked askance at Eve’s fig leaf. But what happens when the women being policed are actual police, and their clothes are interfering with their policing? Every woman garda should be grateful to Catherine Bartley and her colleagues because, if it wasn’t for their tenacity, these gardaí might still be hitching up their sturdy but awkward skirts to pursue a handbag snatcher. She recalled her efforts to ditch the Garda skirt in favour of trousers in an interview with John O’Brien for the oral history project undertaken by the Garda Síochána Retired Members’ Association (gardahistory.com).
Garda Bartley joined An Garda Síochána in 1987 and looked on as her male colleagues were issued with patrol jackets and wet gear, while the women got what she called “pixie wellington boots”. She recalled trying to climb over an 8ft gate and being unable to throw her leg over the top because of the skirt. “And another night, [at] a burglary down in Wellington Quay, trying to get in the window of the shop, and actually ... having a fall backwards, because again the skirt had restricted me.”
After shivering with purple legs on Grafton Street at 5am on a wintry morning in 1990, she made a poster highlighting the issue. A group of women put them up in stations around the country and a meeting was held. It emerged that women gardaí on Border patrol duty were not issued with wet gear and had to change into their colleagues’ gear that they had just stepped out of, after 12 hours of sweat and rain. This led to a furore and, more than three decades after women joined the force, they were issued with trousers, patrol jackets and suitable wet gear.
She remembers the first day she went out in her new trousers, delighted with herself. But there’s always someone waiting to burst your bubble and she remembers “this auld lad” approaching her on Westmoreland Street. “Excuse me Ban Garda ... but I much prefer to have the skirts,” he told her. But it would take more than that to faze Garda Bartley. “I said to him: ‘Well, I have one I don’t want any more, you can have it.’” The response of the auld lad was not recorded.
At least things had moved on from 1958 when the Dáil was debating the introduction of women gardaí. Fianna Fáil’s Donogh O’Malley noted that the women would be aged 20-25 when recruited and asked: “Who is going to protect the morals of these young girls?”
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His party colleague Joseph Brennan wondered if the women would be allowed to carry batons. “Women are reputed to be fairly good with the rolling-pin at times and they might be just as well able as a man to wield a baton,” he observed.
But Independent TD Frank Sherwin was more worried about the cost to the State when these women had to leave the force, upon marriage. He proposed a novel plan to thwart anyone from falling in love with a woman garda. “I would suggest to the Minister that while recruits should not be actually horse-faced, they should not be too good-looking,” he said. “They should be just plain women and not targets for marriage.”
The minister wisely did not respond to this proposal.