We need to remember that the young deserve protection as well as freedom, writes Fintan O'Toole
Two young girls dead in the fields, one 15 years old, the other 14. One the victim of a society which is afraid to challenge the official morality, the other of a society that is afraid of morality itself. One strangled by the rules, the other exposed to the dangers of a world that has no rules. One crushed between the narrow boundaries of what can be said and thought, the other made dizzy by the wide-open spaces where there are no boundaries from which to take your bearings. But both irredeemably dead.
Ann Lovett was found on a bitterly cold January day in 1984 by three boys who spotted her red schoolbag lying at the entrance to the grotto of the Blessed Virgin on a small hill outside Granard. At her side was the pair of scissors she had brought with her to cut the umbilical cord. The baby boy was lying on a moss-covered stone beneath the statue.
Ann was still just about alive, surrounded by her own blood, her arms bruised where she had gripped them against the pain. She died shortly afterwards in hospital from irreversible shock brought on by the combination of haemorrhaging and exposure.
Ann Lovett's death was reported by Emily O'Reilly in the Sunday Tribune. It struck most of us like the lash of a bull-hide whip. Many women wrote to the national father confessor, Gay Byrne, pouring out a torrent of secret shame, and Byrne read the letters in one of the most devastating radio programmes ever broadcast. Truths never told even to best friends and lovers - rapes, hidden pregnancies, babies buried in battered suitcases - seeped into the public mind. The version of Ireland that most of us carry in our heads changed for good. It is not that Ann Lovett's awful death stayed at the forefront of our collective consciousness, but it did take up residency in the back of our minds.
Say the words "Ann Lovett" to most Irish people over 35 now and they know what you mean. Hers is the name we give to lies and hypocrisy, to the reality behind the official veneer of holy Ireland.
Ann Lovett's death did not, of itself, change Irish reality. But it helped to change Irish minds which, in some respects, amounts to the same thing. There is still pain and shame and concealment: only last week, another dead abandoned baby was found.
The prevailing culture has shifted profoundly, however. There is less hypocrisy about sex, less craw-thumping. The notion of justified cruelty against the young in the cause of upholding official morality is more or less gone.
Wind forward now to the death early last week, in a field in Ballindrait, Co Donegal, of Geraldine Chambers. She was even younger than Ann Lovett and her death is no less tragic. But the accoutrements of death are utterly different. Where Ann tried to dull the pain with the opium of religion, Geraldine sought oblivion with the morphine tablets that lay beside her, or with the bottle of vodka that was found nearby.
Where one died because she did not believe the world around her would say "yes" to her need for sympathy, understanding and support, the other died because the world around her has forgotten how to say "no". A culture of extreme repression has been replaced by a culture of extreme tolerance. Haunted, perhaps, by the memory of Ann Lovett, adults are afraid to impose rules on teenagers. The awful loneliness of Ann Lovett has given way to a hedonistic conviviality, in which it is perfectly normal for 14-year-olds to go out for a night's drinking with the girls.
Repelled by its cruelty and hypocrisy, Irish society has dispensed with the church-based moral system from which it derived its rules. What it has not yet done is to develop the civic, social morality that is needed as a replacement. Adults, caught in this no man's land, are not sure what authority they have in setting rules for adolescents. Too many young people are left in a moral wilderness that is, in its way, almost as deathly as the airless room into which the old system locked them.
We need to be as shocked by the death of Geraldine Chambers as we were by the death of Ann Lovett. We need to ask what pain is being dulled by the drink and drugs and possibly the ultimate oblivion of suicide. We need to consider what message our children are getting from a public culture that celebrates conspicuous consumption and associates pleasure with expenditure. We need to look at an education system that condemns drop-outs like Geraldine to a sense of perpetual failure. We need to remember that the young deserve protection as well as freedom.
This is not about going back to the world in which Ann Lovett suffered and died. There is no lost paradise to be regained, and no way back to it even if there were. Even if we wanted to return to the priest with the blackthorn stick rooting the couples out of the ditches, there aren't enough priests to go around. At the back of the revolution in attitudes over the last 20 years was the belief that we could use freedom responsibly.
We've got the freedom. It's time for the responsibility.