The idea that post-independence Ireland was ruled over by a cabal of rosary-clutching misogynists is not just wrong—it’s historically illiterate. It is the sort of drivel peddled by revisionist hacks and ideologues who mistake cherry-picked anecdotes for scholarly analysis. Let’s be clear: Independent Ireland inherited a collapsed British administrative system, an impoverished population, and a medical and legal framework steeped in Victorian British paternalism. It didn’t invent misogyny; it inherited the debris of empire—and did what it could to crawl out from under it.
Professor Ferriter, whose work has contributed much to popularising this bleak caricature, frequently neglects to balance his narrative with the broader European context. He is not alone. In many accounts, Ireland’s early female suffrage—granted in full by 1922, long before Britain (1929)[1], France (1944), Italy (1946), or Switzerland (1971)—is dismissed or ignored altogether. The election of Countess Markievicz to Cabinet in 1919 is treated as an anomaly rather than the clear indication it was of Ireland’s complex and contradictory reality. Meanwhile, the allegedly “enlightened” British political class could barely stomach the idea of a woman at Westminster.
The Irish Constitution of 1937—another favourite bogeyman of the myth-peddlers—did not ban women from the workforce. Article 41.2, the oft-misquoted section about women’s role in the home, was aspirational language, not a prohibition. But why bother with context when outrage sells better than truth?
The real insult here is to the Irish people themselves. These mythologists would have us believe that for nearly a century, the Irish electorate—men and women—consistently voted for governments who supposedly hated half the population. Either Irish women were uniquely masochistic or, more likely, this entire narrative is a concoction of modern ideological delusion projected backwards onto a past few of its critics have bothered to read about.
One of the more telling examples of how modern academics misrepresent the Irish past can be found in Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne’s treatment of a 1931 Dáil Éireann speech by James Fitzgerald-Kenney, then Minister for Justice. Earner-Byrne has repeatedly claimed this speech as evidence of misogyny within the highest levels of government—a convenient citation for those invested in the narrative of post-independence Ireland as a uniquely repressive patriarchy. But what did the Minister actually say? The speech in question related to legislation permitting unmarried mothers to claim maintenance from the father of their child—hardly the expected battleground for alleged woman-hating. In fact, Fitzgerald-Kenney supported the measure, recognising the social and economic vulnerability of these women. His only reservation, voiced in parliamentary debate, concerned the evidentiary standard and the risk of false paternity claims—concerns echoed across legal systems then and now.[2]
In fact, Fitzgerald-Kenney supported the bill precisely because it gave unmarried women a new legal weapon—the right to haul a recalcitrant father into court for maintenance. His lone caveat concerned proof of paternity and the risk that the reform, if badly drafted, might be exploited by the odd “gold-digger.”[3] To recast that remark as a blanket denunciation of all single mothers—as Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne does when she claims the Minister “presented a disturbingly misogynistic approach to welfare, depicting the unmarried mother as ‘temptress and black-mailer’”²—is not analysis; it is sleight-of-hand, stripping the speech of its legislative context and ignoring every balancing sentence.
Earner-Byrne’s interpretation requires a remarkable act of contortion: transforming a Justice Minister’s effort to extend legal protection to unmarried mothers into a diatribe against women. The source material simply does not bear out the accusation. But this is the modus operandi of much modern Irish feminist historiography: isolate a line, ignore the legislative context, and then parade it as proof of a misogynistic regime. That such claims have been uncritically reproduced in both academic and media commentary speaks volumes about the current state of peer review and the intellectual incuriosity of Irish public discourse.
These myths began to gain traction with the rise of “Women’s Studies” departments across Irish universities—an enterprise that rapidly devolved from scholarly pursuit into ideological activism thinly disguised as academia. From their inception, these departments displayed open hostility to scrutiny, reacting to even the mildest attempts at quality control or peer review with indignation and moral outrage. The result is a self-contained echo chamber where conjecture is promoted as fact and where no serious academic dares to engage critically for fear of reputational reprisal or ideological excommunication. In such an environment, easily disprovable nonsense not only survives but flourishes—shielded from examination by a wall of emotive rhetoric. Presented with the tone of righteous indignation and a veneer of moral authority, these narratives bypass the public’s critical faculties entirely. Emotional manipulation substitutes for evidence, and the average reader, unaware that they are being fed dogma rather than history, swallows the myth whole.
Conjecture is the national fuel of modern Ireland—clean-burning, easily produced, and entirely untethered from evidence. The intellectual tools that once safeguarded young minds against nonsense—logic, historical method, basic scepticism—have been quietly removed from the curriculum and replaced with grievance, guilt, and groupthink. The result? A generation trained to loathe its own past, pity its parents, and confuse national self-respect with moral defect. We’ve managed to produce citizens who treat inherited identity as a kind of shameful rash—something to be hidden, apologised for, and never discussed in polite company. What a triumph. What a tragedy. What a finely polished nightmare.
No Country for Honest Historians
EJ
[1] British women did not get the vote on equal terms with men until 1929. In 1919 they, along with working class men got the vote but women had to be 29 years old to vote. When Ireland became independent it have the vote to women on the same basis as men, 21 years of age.
[2] Dáil Éireann Debates, Vol. 39, 29 April 1931, discussion on the Illegitimate Children (Affiliation Orders) Bill. James Fitzgerald-Kenney expressed support for the principle of the bill while noting legal concerns about proving paternity in contested cases. Full text available at: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1931-04-29/
[3] Lindsey Earner-Byrne, “Reinforcing the Family: The Role of Gender, Morality and Sexuality in Irish Welfare Policy, 1922–1944,” History of the Family 13, no. 4 (2008), p. 364, where she characterises the Minister’s intervention as “a disturbingly misogynistic approach to welfare … unmarried mother as temptress and black-mailer.”
