Legally and culturally schizophrenic.

Kicking and Screaming: Dragging Ireland into the 21st Century

Ivana Bacik (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, 160pp) 0862788609, $16.95

What do we know about Ireland? Economic miracle, immigrant and tourist destination, highly skilled intellectual workers, Bono and U2, Seamus Heaney and The Faith Healer, socialized health care, exploding youth culture, designer hotels, profiles in Vogue as surely as The Wall Street Journal: no longer the sentimental dream of Irish America but the very model of a modern social democracy.

Where is the priest-ridden stereotype of yore? What about Angela's Ashes and The Magdalene Sisters? What about a national constitution formed from the Catholic social thinking of the 1930s, the decade of German brownshirts and Irish blueshirts? What about the condom wars of the last quarter-century, the prohibition on abortion?

Observers agree that contemporary Ireland is unrecognizable from the agrarian backwater that first saw rural electrification a mere 50 years ago. Gone is the endemic censorship of books and films.

Gone also is criminalization of male homosexuality and the unavailability of divorce. Sex education is taught in schools. Women hold positions of power throughout Irish society, and a former Irish head of state has served as UN high commissioner for human rights.

So, what's the problem?

In Kicking and Screaming, Ivana Bacik argues that this new secular, liberal Ireland sits uneasily alongside its Catholic traditions--a disconnect foretold by the late Cardinal Tomas O'Fiaich, who once suggested that the Catholic church in ireland was rural-based and unsophisticated in a country rapidly becoming neither.

Modern Ireland, in this analysis, is a legal and cultural schizophrenic.

An unapologetic feminist, distinguished lawyer and sometime political candidate who came of age during the culture wars of the 1980s--divisive campaigns to reform divorce (1986) and abortion law (1983)--Bacik is particularly well-placed to give us this analysis.

In chapters focusing on ideas of family, gender equality, sexual offenses, ethnicity and environment, Bacik lays out the historical context for a broad social agenda and reviews legal initiatives and political argument, identifying the current status of her issues and where further reform is indicated.

Discussing reproductive rights, Bacik weaves her way through the minefield that is Irish abortion politics. Players in this story include the Catholic church, the British Empire, postcolonial Ireland, the European Union and the European Convention on Human Rights. Those of us who lived it (as Bacik, to her endless credit, continues to do) are exhausted by the necessary narrative--this is important legal history, after all!--and long for her conclusions. Bacik sees resolution of the abortion issue as lying within a legal framework regulating provision of a range of reproductive health services.

Predictably, she calls for removal of Article 40.3.3 of the Irish constitution, which guarantees fetal right to life and underlies the application of all criminal and civil law on abortion. As every Irish politician is acutely aware, this proposal would require a national referendum on abortion. Given that the wording of this article (guaranteeing the equal right to life of the "mother") was itself a Jesuitical compromise between militant antichoice demands and liberal instincts, such a referendum seems singularly unlikely, however passionately Bacik may argue the case.

And, besides Bacik, just who is arguing this case or for any of the other agenda items in Kicking and Screaming? Dynamic postindustrial economies have not performed well as breeding grounds for radical activism, especially among the young. Let's face it, it's hard to focus on a social agenda when you're wrapped up in the social calendar and brand recognition. (Which vodka is appropriate to Philip Treacy decor is such a vexing question. Love the Manolos!)

Which brings us to the question of who this book is for. As a primer on the issues, Bacik has provided a useful addition to school shelves, assuming that civics and modern history continue as core curricula. The general reader, however, may be too attention-challenged for the detail of her exposition. On the other hand, the activist--and we can only hope that there will be activists, not just beneficiaries-may find her prescriptions, such as they are, less than comprehensive or compelling.

Bacik, who is Reid professor of criminal law at Trinity College, Dublin, will continue her campaigning work on human rights and civil liberties, and Irish society--schizo as it may currently be--will be the better for her efforts. In 20 years, the landscape will be again changed, and we can look forward to Bacik's mature review of it at that time.

In the meantime, the patient clearly remains a suitable case for treatment.

As director of Open Door Counseling, RUTH RIDDICK was a pioneer in the provision of crisis pregnancy counseling in Ireland. Her most recent piece for Conscience is a review of "Vera Drake'" (Spring 2005).