Writing in today’s Irish Times (Letters) psychotherapist Joseph Flanagan indulges in the by now semi-obligatory go at the Catholic Church. The context is the current abortion debate.

He accuses the Church of trying to “control this nation’s moral judgement” and of being “hysterical” in its reaction to the abortion bill. He brings up the issue of clerical sex abuse for good measure.

He also says: “Ireland did not fall apart when contraception and divorce were introduced against the Catholic Church’s wishes and neither will it after the introduction of this Bill.”

It is this last statement I’d like to take up. No, Ireland has not fallen apart as a result of the changes he mentions but a case can certainly be made that it has been damaged.

Consider the fact that 250,000 adults in Ireland are now divorced or separated. That is a fivefold increase compared with 1986.

The introduction of divorce alone is not to blame. What is more at fault is an increasingly untrammelled individualism that operates at the expense of an ethic of commitment.

Social conservatives were concerned that divorce would further erode this ethic of commitment.

For its part, widely available contraception has made it easy to separate sex from commitment, let alone marriage. But many pregnancies still take place outside of marriage and outside of a committed relationship.

One obvious result of this is that many women are forced to raise their children alone by men who were happy to have sex with them but not commit to them.

In addition, roughly one in twelve Irish pregnancies ends in abortion.

Easily available contraception was supposed to greatly reduce the number of ‘unwanted children’ by allowing people to ‘control their fertility’.

But clearly many children are unwanted by their fathers. When this happens, the child will typically be raised by one parent only. If a child is unwanted by its mother, the result is often abortion.

Personally, I am not opposed to either legalised divorce (although I am against no-fault, unilateral divorce), and I am not against legalised contraception.

But high marital breakdown is not a good thing, and the way contraception has separated sex from commitment is not a good thing either. In both cases the main victims are children.

It is a pity most liberals seem wholly incapable of recognising this fact.