Conor Kenny
Staff Writer
When the Stamullen horse trainer Peter Casey witnessed his beloved Flemenstar gallop to victory at Leopardstown this weekend, so overjoyed was he that his thoughts soon turned to riding of a different nature. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I’ll sleep tonight. I’ll have fuckin’ sex tonight and everything,” he informed the bewildered RTE presenter Tracy Piggott. Far from being criticized for this outburst, Mr. Casey has become something of a national hero, with the “over 70” year-old racking up over 120 000 hits for this clip on YouTube. Indeed, national interest in the incident has escalated to such an extent that Mrs. Casey herself was interviewed about her and her husband’s extra-curricular activities. “We might have a little, small row but we always have plenty of sex – I’m fine, I love it,” she gleefully remarked. Lucky girl. But this kind of occurrence begs the question – has Ireland finally entered an age where sex is no longer a religion-guarded taboo?
Candidness on this issue certainly seems to be on the rise at the moment. Ireland’s first sex festival (a discussion based one, don’t get too excited), is to be held in Dublin at the end of February. Among the many issues to be covered, the event organisers claim that the one-day festival will feature presentations on “relationships, yoga, spiritual speed dating and BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism and masochism)”. I don’t know about you, but the conflation of activities in that latter presentation certainly makes me feel a bit uneasy; after all, that’s going to take a lot out of you. And is it really practical to offer a crash course on the ‘spanking bench’ so soon after a nice refreshing spot of yoga? All joking aside, this event undoubtedly marks a milestone in Irish culture, and forces one to ruminate on how we ever became such a nation of prudes in the first place.
In the scintillating “Occasions of Sin: sex and society in modern Ireland”, the author Diarmuid Ferriter describes how he once encountered an unemployed man in a Dublin tenement who elucidated that: “Irish people do not talk about their private affairs; they do not express their feelings; they usually talk of something beside the point”. Could this solely be the result of decades of sexual and emotional repression by the long arm of the Catholic Church? It almost seems too obvious an explanation, but this theory certainly fits the bill. There can be no doubt that many Irish politicians during the twentieth century identified themselves as Catholics, a reality that would have inevitably influenced their policies on matters pertaining to sexual morality. Indeed, it appears that this kind of mentality penetrated (if you’ll excuse the unfortunate pun) nearly every aspect of life in this country. In a case that would have shocked many liberals today, the Cork Examiner wrote in 1936 of a judge who condemned two teenagers being used for sex in the backstreets of the city as “two little girls who were a positive danger to the people of Cork”. As is the case with all religious fundamentalism, female allure is always considered a greater evil than male randiness.
Thankfully, it seems as though the times they are a’ changin’. In “Global Ireland: same difference” by Tom Inglis, it is noted that “not only are Irish people having sex earlier, young people are having sex with more partners”. He goes on to report how “attitudes have changed dramatically” on the issue of sex outside of marriage, and that now only 6 percent of the population consider such an act to be immoral. The author then proceeds to make an unintentionally humorous and unfortunate comparison between the sexual merits of two feminine role models from quite different generations – the Virgin Mary, and Barbie. This gives you some notion of how rapidly (and weirdly) Irish culture has advanced in the last fifty years.
Mr. Casey’s outburst at the weekend was a refreshing indication that sexual liberation among all generations might be progressing in Ireland. As the wizened Gore Vidal once saliently noted, one should “never pass up a chance to have sex, or appear on television”. So as RTE’s viewers were forced to imagine the exultant Mrs. Casey breathlessly straddling her husband’s antediluvian anaconda on Sunday night, it was clear to everyone that St. Patrick had failed to get rid of all the snakes in the land.
