On Saturday morning I was tidying up the kitchen and not paying much attention to the radio. Then I recognised the voice of Justine McCarthy and I turned it up as she is always worth listening to.

What unfolded over the next 30 minutes had the tears flowing down my face. Justine told her family story. A story of a mother widowed young and left with four daughters between the ages of one and 10 to rear.

She told us about her eldest sister, Berenice – a sister she idolised and whose life and that of her family changed for ever in 1974. You see, Berenice “got into trouble”. Then, to avoid the stigma of having a baby outside of marriage, the young girl went to the UK to wait out her pregnancy.

Justine and her two sisters only twigged that something was wrong when their mother didn’t turn up at their boarding school for Sunday visits for weeks on end. Instead, she was in the UK supporting her eldest daughter. Berenice had a baby boy whom she put up for adoption. Shortly afterwards, she moved to South Africa and never lived in Ireland again.

For the next 38 years, her mother kept a photo of her first grandchild in her purse. She was in a nursing home and living with Alzheimer’s and unable to speak when this grandchild came back into the lives of her family. When asked wasn’t it wonderful that Duncan Carr McCarthy had made contact with Justine, she said “it is”. These were the only words she uttered in two years. Soon afterwards, she passed away.

Sadly, Duncan never got to meet Berenice as she died at the young age of 51. He has, however, three aunts and an extended family he is very much a part of.

I was a teenager in 1974, so “getting into trouble” is a sentence that has huge resonance for anyone my age and older. It brought shame and disgrace on a family in the eyes of their neighbours. So many times I heard my mother say that so and so was “thrown out” by her family because she was pregnant or that there had to be a “hush hush” wedding.

It seems extraordinary now that during that year, An Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave voted against his own Government’s defeated bill to allow married couples buy contraceptives. Having sex and, God forbid, making a baby seemed to be the most terrible sin you could commit.

Since 1974, so many of the rigid social mores that ruled our society have changed and despite all the warnings of social collapse from the naysayers, the vast majority of it has been for the good.

Today, appropriate sex education is widely available in primary and secondary schools. Contraceptives are freely available and not just to married couples. Though expensive, we have adequate crèche facilities and financial support for single mothers. None of this was in place in 1974

And despite it all, society didn’t break down. Amazingly, the number of teenage pregnancies fell by 60% between 2001 and 2013 – down from 3,087 to 1,253. They even fell below figures from the 1960s when so much was hidden away.

The country isn’t perfect yet but we have come a long way and we are much the better for it.