Sir, – As one of your online subscribers, I happened to notice that there were several articles about the 1980s in Ireland on irishtimes.com recently.
I was a student in those days and I spend two years living in Ireland, one year studying at the National Institute for Higher Education in Dublin and another year doing a practical training in Wicklow.
First of all I want to make clear I liked my first year in Ireland so much that I came back for a second, which I enjoyed as well.
Although I was Catholic myself, coming from a Catholic area in Germany, I was quite amazed about some things that happened in Ireland in those years which I had not heard of back in Germany. I read about the “moving statues”, felt quite amused whenever I saw someone nearly falling of their bike when passing a church and blessing themselves in a hurry, and I was really astounded to hear that abortion, contraception and even divorce were more or less illegal then.
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Looking back, one episode I witnessed seems really amusing to me now. I attended Mass one Sunday morning in 1986. The sermon was mainly about divorce, and the priest really got worked up about the topic. He strongly expressed his discontent about the fact that all sorts of people presumed to discuss whether divorce ought to remain illegal or not. People should leave those kinds of decisions to the experts, he claimed, namely to the Catholic priests.
What amazed me most was the fact that not the slightest grumbling was to be heard in the church. I wondered if that was because everybody agreed or if all people were asleep and not listening anyway. Today I tend to believe the latter was the case. – Yours, etc,
SIEGFRIED KUTTIG,
Lüneburg,
Germany.