Grace O'Malley's castle stands in ruins on Clare Island. The great pirate queen once sailed the Atlantic and Irish seas. She dared to defy the way things were. In return, she was almost forgotten.
Joe Heaney's rendering of Oro, Se do Bheatha 'Bhaile sings of this powerful, courageous woman, Grainne Mhaol, as part of the Irish experience, however much her own experience was denied. His voice could as well sing out through Dublin's port on Thursday when a ship called Sea Change sails into harbour, reminding us of other forgotten women, here and worldwide.
If the Irish are the "blacks" of Europe, as Roddy Doyle's Commitments claimed, then Irish women are the blacks of the developed world. Their access to sexual and reproductive care is on a par with Latin America, Asia and Africa.
The European Union's most effective economy is a Third World reproductive health provider. It won't educate its people; it won't authorise the safest morning-after pills; above all, it won't admit the scale of the problem.
The Women on Waves Foundation which operates Sea Change will visit Third World countries as part of its mission to alert the world to the crisis in reproductive healthcare. Almost 20 million back-street abortions are carried out each year, with some 80,000 women dying as a result.
The gag order George Bush's administration has placed on even mentioning the word "abortion" will make it progressively more difficult for such countries to access non-directive information and education about sexual and reproductive healthcare, as well as safe and reliable contraception.
The world is on the brink of global denial, not for reasons of ethics but for reasons of control. Dr Rebecca Gomperts, Women on Waves's director, has seen the levels of child prostitution and maternal mortality in Latin America, but chose Ireland as her first port of call.
Ireland is a case study in how to deny human sexuality, both its joyful and tragic dimensions. The denial of sexual and reproductive rights is a symptom of a wider cultural stasis, as James Joyce recognised in his call to "silence, exile and cunning". Artists and writers, as well as doctors and lawyers, will hold workshops and exhibitions over the Bloomsday period to tease out what that denial entails.
Some people see the ship in the tradition of the contraceptive train 30 years ago, when women travelled to Northern Ireland to buy condoms and waved them provocatively at gardai on their return home. But Ireland has lost its innocence in the meantime.
The caring, socially well-educated society which people envisaged 30 years ago never materialised as they hoped. Sex and reproduction issues, though improved, have been ducked. Their management remains in crisis.
Some 79 per cent of recent poll respondents believe that, in some cases, abortion should be available within this jurisdiction. Yet, despite urges to legislate in line with the X case judgment, even rape and incest victims must still travel overseas.
Entering Anna Livia's waters, Sea Change will bring professional medical staff ready to give counsel and support on sexual and reproductive health.
Men and women facing crisis pregnancy will be offered practical help. Nothing has been done for them otherwise, despite the high moral ground occupied by an Oireachtas committee that took no first-hand evidence about the experience of crisis pregnancy, or crisis parenthood.
NOTHING has been done to develop a £50 million agency the committee spoke about, while patting itself on its collective back. Meanwhile, 6,338 Irish women gave addresses in this State when having abortions in Britain last year, yielding the highest percentage rate of late abortions in Europe.
Those women travelled in fear and at great expense over other waters - from their homes near the rivers Lee, Lagan, Corrib, Moy, Barrow, Nore, Suir; from the midlands, the mountains, the flat plains of Kildare. Sea Change can visit only one other Irish port.
Like Grace O'Malley, Irish women's experience of crisis pregnancy is outside the rubrics of this ostensibly democratic place. Their crisis is seen as a transgression, for which they as individuals must take the blame while politicians party on regardless.
No one knew how to speak about Grace O'Malley until her biographer, Anne Chambers, disinterred her story. Other chieftains were eulogised in poetry composed in their honour, yet when Dr Mairin Nic Eoin made her award-winning study, B'ait Leo Bean [Women Were Rare/Strange to Them], she found that Grainne Mhaol was ignored until the sentimental strains of nationalist balladry began to sing of her in neutered refrains.
On Bloomsday 2001, Joyce's words, as they apply to those thousands of women travelling abroad for abortions, can't but underline the lack of moral authority with which the Irish Government and its agencies pretend to manage crisis pregnancy. Silence, exile and cunning ought not to be the order of today.
mruane@irish-times.ie