"It's had for me to believe that condoms were impossible to get in Ireland"
Condoms we virtually impossible to get outside the cities - Ireland is a rural country
Sex does not work by a rule book - it is often a spur of the moment act - it was a sin to contemplate birth control.
The forbidding of birth control was an act ob barbarism considering that large families was the main cause of poverty and hardship among the lower classes.
The grim irony of all this is while the church was dictating the sexual behaviour of the faithful it was ignoring and often facilitating the rape of children.
As far as I am able to find, even today, the only compromise the modern church has considered on the subject of contraception, is in the cases of the spread of AIDS, and that, reluctantly.
The church continues to prove itself unfit to guide, let alone dictate on sexual matters.
Jim Carroll

"Ignoring the mountain of evidence, some maintain that the Church considers the use of contraception a matter for each married couple to decide according to their "individual conscience." Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. The Church has always maintained the historic Christian teaching that deliberate acts of contraception are always gravely sinful, which means that it is mortally sinful if done with full knowledge and deliberate consent (CCC 1857). This teaching cannot be changed and has been taught by the Church infallibly."
THE CHURCH AND BIRTH CONTROL