Social change and soulful battles

Just when you thought contraception was a dead French letter, the damnable religious wrangling over its rights and wrongs surfaced on the front page of this newspaper last Sunday. Journalist Susan Mitchell revealed that scruples over the use of barrier contraception had halted or delayed clinical trials of cancer drugs in some Dublin hospitals run by religious orders.

It was explosive stuff, and it rightly popped and fizzled across news pages during the ...