Mary Lou McDonald: contest between her and calamity Coughlan was over before it began

A wind of change is blowing across the face of Ireland. Every now and then, it becomes a gust. Did you not feel the shiver when Brian Cowen became Taoiseach and spoke in unscripted Irish, sang a come-all-ye melody about his father, and went up to the Áras with his wife and his girls to get his seal of office, and then went around the country addressing the people from the back of a lorry with his sleeves rolled up? You felt it when the nine o'clock news showed pictures of dole queues snaking out the door again. You felt it when Bertie Ahern, deposed but unashamed, came out of the tribunal room to a cacophony of jeers and adoring applause. You felt it when the forces of the right came blinking back into the daylight for the Lisbon referendum, as if they sensed their exile from post-Catholic boomtown was over. You felt it when we exulted in being the ungrateful contrarians of Europe; no more the model citizens up before dawn for Mammon and to take our mind off our vanished psychosis.

Ireland is in a state of flux. The change is happening faster than the economic nosedive. The mood of conservatism is palpable. It is as if the nation has been away on a long, licentious holiday of sybaritic carousing in the back seat of a Maserati. And now we're home. It's June: prices are spiralling, that shower of good-for-nothings in the Dáil are packing their bags for their three-month skite, the courts are bulging with murder trials, the builders' cranes are coming down, the churches are empty, and it's bloody freezing for mid-summer. You've got to ask yourself the $6m question. Where did we go wrong?

There is a theory that one can only be a true-blue conservative – a Maggie Thatcher, let's say – when one has accumulated something worth conserving. Interesting, wasn't it, that the two eminences grises of Libertas's mission to stop Lisbon in its tracks were multimillionaires. Leaving aside Joe Higgins and Richard Boyd-Barrett, who are socialists programmed to resist the status quo, the rest of the No-to-Lisbon wing largely consisted of the holy right preaching the gospel of Irish-ergo-Catholic. The last time Richard Greene of Cóir (the one with the poster about our forebears dying for freedom) was heard from was in May 2000 when he addressed the Oireachtas committee on the constitution and pronounced: "In the horrific matter of rape and incest, the utmost genuine compassion and care, medical attention, support and love must be given to a woman or girl in this situation, but we must remember that abortion of her unborn baby will never undo the rape."

Greene used to head up a group called Muintir na hÉireann Teoranta. His present incarnation, Cóir, shares a postal address with Youth Defence whose erstwhile cheerleader, Niamh Nic Mhathúna, was back for Lisbon as Niamh Uí Bhriain. Back too were the evangelical Dana and the voice of educated, erudite Irish womanhood, Caroline Simons, a solicitor and a mother. This preponderance of articulate women advocating the rejection of European rule was no accident. Simons became ever more visible as the campaign wore on, as did Bean Uí Bhriain. As for the contest between Mary Lou McDonald (Sinn Féin has its share of gains to protect too) and the calamitous Mary Coughlan, it was over before it started. As sure as Tutan-khamen was a pampered prince, when historians come to sift through the debris of Lisbon they will find that it was the Women Say No lobby who swung the vote. More women than men voted against it. Nothing was more scarifying in a campaign hallmarked by scaremongering about neutrality, abortion and taxation than the predicted loss of our unique personality. Putting your X in the box marked Yes meant relinquishing the nation's values – whatever they were.

Europe is a feminist issue. Before we joined it, married women were barred from the workplace, single women (and an awful lot of married ones too) were forbidden the contraceptive pill, they had no financial independence, no say in their own reproductive health decisions – a diaphragm was more seditious than a petrol bomb – and their only entrée to public service was by inheriting a dead father's or husband's seat in the Dáil. We women, more than any other collection of Irish citizens, should be on our knees thanking the Treaty of Rome for our liberation. Yet, among the babble of opinions vying over Lisbon, not a single feminist voice warned against the creeping nostalgia for the old Ireland of comely maidens. Feminism has lost its balls. Somewhere in the welter of consumerism and lap dance clubs and the idiotic media story that the Spice Girls embodied girl power, women surrendered the spoils of the war hard won by the previous generation in a straight swap for a boob job and a pat on the head. The female body is more objectified than ever before.

This phenomenon has two alarming consequences. One is that the last people willing to object aloud are the tiny number of women who have made it into the ruling class and wish to be seen as flexible and ladylike. The second ramification is that it creates the appetite for a backlash. Sensible, modern women with families and careers and a pair of Crocs in the ward-robe are la-menting the trollopisation of femalehood and yearning for something more substantive. Many other women are surveying the dereliction bequeathed to them by the fleeing Celtic Tiger in abandoned regeneration projects and a floundering health service. This is the crossroads where secularism starts to lose the tug-o'-war to fundamentalist fervour.

The process of reinvention has been speeded up by the economic pinch. Cut-backs, job losses and inflation focus minds on the task of conservation. Ten years ago, Ibec was begging the government to reform childcare so that mothers could be coaxed back into the workplace. With the dole queues lengthening, that will no longer be the case. Women will be rebuked for their "feline sophistries" (as some anti-treatyist said of the brilliant but narrowly academic Dr Brigid Laffan). They will become dispensable again and get put back in their box. Complex issues like civil partnerships, children's constitutional rights and human embryo research will be parked. Wait and see.

For Declan Ganley's vision of Irishness is as traditional as Dev's. He gave an interview last month to Hibernian, a trenchant espouser of "an independent 32-county Irish nation free of all foreign domination." Asked if the Lisbon Treaty could cause Irish children to be indoctrinated, father-of-four Ganley responded: "Absolutely. 'Well, actually no, you can't say that, Johnny. You can't bless yourself before a game because that would suggest you might have some kind of religion or something.'"

The EU should take its nose out of his family's values, he told the magazine which believes in "a thoroughly Catholic and Gaelic culture and outlook" and rejects "the notion of a multicultural, multi-faith secularised Ireland for the nonsense it is."

For any ladies out there who still have not woken up to the imperilment of the assets accumulated from our European membership, take note of Hibernian's mission statement which praises "those activists who are trying to clean up the mess created by lesbian-
feminists during the course of their assault on the traditional family." They are talking about people like Mary Robinson, who used Europe to challenge the suppression of women's rights in Ireland.

Now, do you feel that
shiver?