Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone : WHOREDOM IN KIMMAGE: Irish Women Coming of Age, <i> By Rosemary Mahoney (Houghton Mifflin Co.: $21.95; 307 pp.)</i>

The sexes are as separate in Ireland as in many parts of the Third World. They inhabit different spaces, talk mainly to their own kind. The Irish joke, defining an Irish homosexual as a man who prefers women to drink, is no joke.

James Joyce recorded this Hibernian apartheid early in this century. In the short stories called “Dubliners,” the women hover in the background or do not appear at all. His masterpiece “Ulysses” shows a day in the life of garrulous men, gabbling with each other from pub to library to graveyard until, exhausted, they fall asleep. Then there is an explosion: From her bed, where she has been lying all day, Molly Bloom erupts with her famous soliloquy, an outpouring of the dark, uncensorable female voice that the men have ignored.

Joyce had no doubt which voice was closer to reality. He gave his archetypal Irish woman the last word. Now Rosemary Mahoney gives them an entire book.

An American of Irish descent, brought up in an Irish neighborhood of Boston, she spent 1991 in Dublin and County Clare and discovered a new breed of Irish woman far removed from Mother Machree.

Earthy, confident, independent, outspoken, these new women refuse marriage; live openly with their boyfriends, have babies out of wedlock. Some are lesbian, many are feminists. One feminist is president. Mrs. Mary Robinson, when a liberal Senator, introduced the first legislation to legalize contraception in Ireland; she won rights for homosexuals, children born out of wedlock, the right of women to sit on juries. And, speaking before she was president, Robinson openly accused “the whole patriarchal, male-dominated presence of the Catholic Church” for the down-trodden status of Irish women.

Mahoney, a fine reporter, balances her social portrait with plenty of evidence that the traditional Irish mother is still there, and traditional family values too. In 1983 Irish voters added an absolute ban on abortion to the Irish constitution. And the conservatives are fighting the radicals hard. It was a member of the powerful Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child who contributed the title of this book when she referred to Ireland’s feminists and a notorious Dublin working-class area in the same breath: “Those women encourage whoredom in Kimmage!”

Mahoney’s specialty is capturing the human voice. President Robinson, however, is too conscious of her present obligation to be president of all the people to be drawn any more into free-wheeling remarks. The interview with her is the least revealing of those in this book.

The author was better served by Ruth Riddick, founder of an open-line pregnancy counseling service and scapegoat of Irish moral conservatives. Asked why, if Irish women are so oppressed, Ireland is considered a matriarchy, Riddick said frankly, “The less power we’ve had publicly, the more power we have insisted upon privately. Irish men have used the myth of the matriarchal Irish mother as an excuse for their own sort of bad behaviour, really.”

And behave badly Irish men do. They still drink a lot. And talk. As a traveler’s tale, this book is as good as a trip to Ireland. Six hours in Dillon’s Pub (as the only woman present) were well spent. Mahoney delivers miraculously the essence of the Dublin nasal accent, a very long way from the cute brogue of Hollywood’s Irish police; wittily and unprintably obscene and surprisingly irreligious.

For evocative scenes and trenchant observations like this, “Whoredom in Kimmage” is wonderful. But as a work of social analysis it is not.

Mahoney’s is essentially a romantic, Irish-American view of Ireland. She loves the place. She has learned its unusable language. She has taken up its offer of citizenship to anyone who can prove an Irish grandparent. She pretends (even though the Irish papers, like those everywhere, are full of news of drugs, rape and child abuse) that it is less dangerous than it is. For part of her Irish year she lived alone in an isolated castle, laughing off local people who thought she should be frightened. She hitchhiked rides. She walked alone late at night in Dublin and went unescorted to bars: Princess Valiant, protected by an invisible cloak of empathy.

She quotes one of the new liberated women as saying sarcastically, “There’s only one sin in Ireland. Sex.”

It is not clear that Mahoney appreciates the irony of that statement. There are other sins in Ireland, notably the inability to control the Irish Republican Army. In this book, the IRA rates scant and dismissive mention, but its dark unseen presence is as crippling as the Mafia’s in Italy.

Most worrying, she underestimates the real forces for change in Irish society. One is the kinship with Britain, which for many in modern Ireland is not only the country of Cromwell and the Black and Tans (to whom Mahoney gives ample attention) but of employment, of the BBC and of women’s magazines with their advertisements for the clinics that draw 4,000 or more Irish women every year to Britain for abortions.

The other force is Europe. Membership in the European community has brought Ireland prosperity and ended its isolation. The European Convention of Human Rights has forced Ireland, as a signatory, to drop its legal ban on homosexuality. In time, the same agreement on basic rights will put an end to Irish bans on advertisements for British pregnancy advice clinics and on civil divorce.

Mahoney’s highly readable loving portrait of her grandparent’s Ould Country is a reminder that the American Irish are as different from the Irish Irish as American Jews are from Israelis, and even more out of touch. Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone; it’s now a member of the European Community. Mahoney is right to say that Irish women are still constrained. But she’s wrong to ignore that even more than their own spirit, it is Ireland’s union with Europe that will free them.