One of the most important social changes in 20th century Ireland came not from the pen of an activist or the mind of a lawyer, but from the dignified anger of a Dublin housewife.
Mary ‘May’ McGee, who died this week at the age of 81, became a reluctant icon of Irish feminism when she and her husband Shay successfully took a Supreme Court case in 1973 against the State’s ban on contraception.
Ms McGee was born in 1944 near Skerries, the second in a family of seven children. She would meet her future husband when they were about 14 years old and hung out around the harbour in Skerries.
He diligently courted the popular teenager, assuring her he’d be around long after her other admirers. They got married on June 1st, 1968 and were inseparable for over 50 years. Shay McGee died in January, 2024.
RM Block
The couple’s first four children arrived between 1968 and 1970 – Martin, Gerard and twins Sharon and Sylvia. The pregnancies were brutal on Ms McGee, who became seriously ill during each one. She was so unwell after the birth of the twins in November, 1970, Shay feared for her life.
By chance, their local GP was the late Dr James Loughran, a founding member of the Irish Family Planning Association. He advised Ms McGee to use a diaphragm on health grounds. This required the importation of a spermicide jelly, which was swiftly seized by Customs under a 1935 law banning the sale, importation and advertisement of contraception.
So began a landmark legal crusade that would bring the McGees to the Supreme Court in 1973, where they successfully argued for a constitutional right to contraception on the grounds of marital privacy. The housewife and the fisherman were hardly the archetypes of feminist activism, but they had identified a wrong they felt should be made right. Mr McGee stunned the court when, under intensely personal cross examination about whether he would be happy to see his wife on contraception, he said: “I’d prefer to see her using contraceptives than be placing flowers on her grave.”
The judgment was one of the most significant in the history of the Supreme Court. Ireland was consumed by a debate about contraception, which was decried from the parish altar and debated on The Late Late Show.
The McGees would walk out of their local Mass in Skerries the week of their Supreme Court win, having been shamed by the priest. Both worried about how their families would cope with the backlash. Ms McGee would later recall, with a chuckle, how her devoutly Catholic mother denounced her daughter’s detractors: “Ah, f**k them.”
The McGees forced the State to act, but change came slowly. When then-Minister for Health brought forward a Bill in 1979 to legislate for the McGee case, Haughey told the Dáil it was an “Irish solution to an Irish problem”. It sought to appease both conservatives and liberals by providing contraception through a prescription for “bona fide” family planning. It would take more than a decade for contraception to be liberally available in a meaningful way. The requirement for a prescription for emergency contraception would endure until 2017.
The McGees went back to their family home. Even their own children didn’t realise for years the pivotal role their parents had played in modern Irish history.
They would go on to have two more children – Darren and Andrea – before Shay McGee would be the one to access contraception, opting for a vasectomy in 1981.
In her heartbreak after her husband passed away, Ms McGee still found a new lease of life, deciding that she would want to make Shay proud of how she used the time she had left on earth without him. She dyed her hair purple and would gleefully frustrate her children when out shopping for things she didn’t need by telling them “your father would want me to have this”.
“Fear could do an awful lot of damage,” May told a 2023 TG4 documentary about their case. “But I really believe that we are a better world today than we were years ago. We are more caring, people look out for each other a bit more than they used to. If I made it different, then I’m glad.”
