As AIDS Strikes Catholic Ireland, a Dispute Erupts Over Limited Sale of Condoms

Dublin, the city at the center of the fastest-growing AIDS epidemic in Europe, has been hit by a dispute over the sale of condoms, widely recognized as one of the most effective measures for preventing the killer disease.

The number of AIDS cases is doubling every nine months in Ireland, but the sale of condoms is confined by law to pharmacies and family planning clinics.

The Irish Family Planning Assn. was taken to court in October for selling condoms at a record store in the Irish capital.

“In this case, the law is clearly an ass,” said Richard Branson, chief of Britain’s Virgin record store chain, after the court threw out a case against the stall at his Dublin shop on a technicality.

“I want to make condoms in Ireland as common as sliced bread,” he said after the court dismissed the case because the notice to prosecute was given more than six months after the original complaint was filed by an anonymous protester.

Branson’s Dublin store sells up to 350 condoms a day, many of them to rural clients visiting the city because they are too embarrassed to buy them locally in this predominantly Catholic state where abortion is illegal. Up to 4,000 Irish women go to Britain each year for abortions.

After the court decision, Branson told reporters it was incredible that at a time when every other government was trying to promote condoms in the worldwide fight against AIDS, Ireland was trying to stop their sale.

Irish Family Planning Assn. chief Christine Donaghy was equally scathing in her criticism of Irish state policy after the case against the stall in the record store, which was set up by her organization.

“This summons will cause Ireland to be seen, once again, as the laughingstock of Europe as our contraceptive laws and policies remain incomprehensible to our European neighbors--and rightly so,” she said.

The case broke in the same week that an Irish government health spokesman told a World Health Organization seminar in Dublin that AIDS is spreading faster here than anywhere else in the European Community.

Fifty-two people have died of AIDS in Ireland.

“We are now entering the epidemic phase of the disease,” government health spokesman Liam Flanagan said.

“The number of cases of AIDS in Ireland is doubling every nine months,” he said. In Britain the figure doubles every two years, in France and West Germany every 2 1/2 years, he said.

The disease is spread mainly by the growing community of drug addicts who transmit it through shared needles and sexual intercourse.

The addicts, who account for about 60% of AIDS cases, are a major concern because officials fear they could be the main conduit for transmitting the disease to the heterosexual community.

Donaghy’s association, which gives advice to about 60,000 people a year, argues that the contraceptive laws are both medically and morally unnecessary and now, in the era of AIDS, positively dangerous.

Under a 1975 law, contraceptives--condoms, birth-control pills, diaphragms and interuterine devices--could only be prescribed by doctors to couples. This was amended in 1985 so that condoms could be sold in pharmacies and family planning centers without prescription to anyone over 18.

Up to 95% of the Irish population is Catholic. The church is a major influence on social issues and was a prime mover in helping to defeat referendums to legalize abortion and divorce.

A 1983 referendum overwhelmingly approved inclusion of a ban on abortion in the country’s constitution.

In September, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child took Irish student union leaders to court for distributing the telephone numbers and addresses of British abortion clinics.

The censors recently lifted a longtime ban on “The Joy of Sex,” a sex manual by Dr. Alex Comfort that has been translated into 18 languages and has sold 10 million copies.