Central to the history of family planning in Ireland is the interaction between religious observance and expressions of Irishness, and how that changed in response to domestic political and socio-economic developments, and international forces. An Irish identity imagined around rural living, Catholicism, large families, traditional gender roles, and sexual puritanism, combined with a belief that Ireland could withstand the changes that were underway in twentieth-century western society in relation to sexual behaviour – drove the sustained hostility to legalising contraception. The 1980s was the decade when it became evident that the tide had turned. The number of married women in the workforce rose significantly, and fertility fell sharply. By the early 1990s Irish fertility was still the highest in Europe, but only by a small margin, and it was lower than in the United States. And yet the decline of this imagined Irishness was not unopposed; indeed, many lamented its passing. it is significant that the moral legislation enacted in the first decades after independence survived until the closing decades of the twentieth century, which might suggest that Ireland was exceptional.