Abstract
This paper examines Irish campaigns for condom access in the early 1990s. Against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, activists campaigned against a law which would not allow condoms to be sold from ordinary commercial spaces or vending machines, and restricted sale to young people. Advancing a conception of ‘transformative illegality’, we show that illegal action was fundamental to the eventual legalisation of commercial condom sale. However, rather than foregrounding illegal condom sale as a mode of spectacular direct action, we show that tactics of illegal sale in the 1990s built on 20 years of everyday illegal sale within the Irish family planning movement. Everyday illegal sale was a long-term world-making practice, which gradually transformed condoms’ legal meanings, eventually enabling new forms of provocative and irreverent protest. Condoms ‘became legal’ when the state recognised modes of condom sale, gradually built up over many years and publicised in direct action and in the courts.
Highlights
On Saturday January 6, 1990, Detective-Sergeant John McKeown of Pearse Street Garda Station entered the Virgin Megastore record shop on Aston Quay, near Temple Bar, in Dublin together with a female colleague
Advancing a conception of ‘transformative illegality’, we show that illegal action was fundamental to the eventual legalisation of commercial condom sale
Rather than foregrounding illegal condom sale as a mode of spectacular direct action, we show that tactics of illegal sale in the 1990s built on 20 years of everyday illegal sale within the Irish family planning movement
Summary
On Saturday January 6, 1990, Detective-Sergeant John McKeown of Pearse Street Garda (police) Station entered the Virgin Megastore record shop on Aston Quay, near Temple Bar, in Dublin together with a female colleague. Open, visible commercial sale of condoms using stalls, shops, vending machines or postal services remained illegal and condoms could not legally be distributed for free.13 This was the law when the IFPA set up a stall to sell condoms to young people at the Virgin Megastore in 1988. It was pretty tough because I told you that the situation financially, this wasn’t a rich organisation, it was always really precarious whether we’d make the year, so the idea of haemorrhaging money not just because you have an active political wing but your active political wing is incurring fines that were rather steep for us in those days, it meant that you had a board of directors, those board of directors were running two clinics that a lot of people depend upon for their basic contraceptive services [...] one of the things that was rather heartening that there was a political commitment (JO’B, youth officer and press officer, IFPA, interview with Máiréad Enright via Skype, March 19, 2014)
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