ABSTRACT
On a more specific level, Irish responses to HIV and AIDS must be considered against the background of the country’s long-standing social policy on marriage, sexuality and reproduction, and its more recent policies on drug problems. For fifty years, following self-government in 1921, the law in Ireland had clearly reflected the teaching of the Catholic Church; abortion, contraception and homosexual activity were all prohibited by statute, while there was a specific constitutional ban on the enactment of divorce legislation. In 1973, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the statutory ban on the importation of contraceptives was in violation of a constitutional right to privacy, and it became evident that family planning legislation would have to be enacted to take account of this ruling. Given the continued opposition of the Catholic Church to contraception and a general cultural ambivalence on this issue, the task of introducing family planning legislation was to prove long and difficult. Family planning legislation was first enacted in 1979, with legal access to contraceptives being confined to those who needed them for bona fide family planning purposes; this ambiguous phrase was generally understood to refer only to married people, with members of the medical profession being made responsible for determining who precisely fell into this category-even to the extent that condoms were only legally available on prescription! Eventually, in 1985, this legislation was amended so that all those over the age of 18, regardless of marital status, could purchase condoms and have legal access to all forms of contraception. In most other Western societies, where the use of the condom for contraceptive purposes had long been normative and noncontroversial, it was relatively simple for health educators to present the public with information on its value as a means of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV. In Ireland, however, it was only following the arrival of HIV that condoms became legally and widely available, and furthermore there was no change in the teaching of the Catholic Church on this issue. This meant that Irish health educators felt obliged to be circumspect in their advocacy of the condom as a means of preventing HIV transmission, lest this be interpreted as promoting promiscuity.
