Claire Keegan

To an outsider.

No, I surely did.

I really wanted to get out.

It felt like a place where you couldn't shine.

That you were a second class citizen.

I mean, girls, for example, in mass, we weren't allowed to serve on the altar because you were dirty, you know.

And I just always felt that I needed to get out and see what life was like elsewhere and if it was as bad elsewhere.

I think I was tired from the time I was a small child of seeing how females were treated like second-class citizens.

And, you know, marital rape was legal here until 1990.

I just couldn't understand really why anybody would go to a church and sign a document to say you can do that to me and then you make yourself into a second class citizen in your own home for the rest of your life.

So, no, it was...

parochial, hugely backward.

And also in the 1980s, we had the highest unemployment in Western Europe.

We just didn't really have a chance.

And contraception was illegal until 1985.

That's crazy.

Oh, I didn't find it much changed.

I came back in 1992.

I applied for 300 jobs and got 300 rejection letters.

So I couldn't get a job, even though I had two first-class bachelor's degrees.