Hint taken...

Thanks to my bro for forwarding me this article from Hotpress.
I take the hint.

The Catholic right has an unexpected ally, liberals aghast at the
unsavoury sight of binge-drinking young Irish women.
The recently published report of the Ferns sex abuse inquiry gives a
timely reminder of how things once were in Ireland. A generation ago,
the structure of our society was very different.

It's hard for anyone under 35 to understand just how different it was
before Gay Byrne read out letters from abused women on his radio show,
before the revelations of the horrors and cruelty of the Magdalen
laundries, before feminism and before the McGee case that paved the
way for the sale of contraceptives in this country.
Once, we danced at the crossroads and women had to leave their jobs in
public service on marriage. Just think of the presumptions!

Who now recalls the contraceptive train? Who now remembers that women
couldn't wear trousers in UCD? Who now recalls the craven compromise
of Charles Haughey's 'Irish solution to an Irish problem' which meant
contraceptives could only be bought on prescription? Who now recalls
the divorce and abortion civil wars?

Who now recalls Ann Lovett bleeding to death in the Granard grotto,
the revelation of her bleak and lonely death condemned by the parish
priest as 'giving scandal'? That misguided man couldn't see that the
real scandal was to hide from the truth, to refuse to acknowledge that
life was as we found it and that sexuality was the fast-flowing fount
of life without which we might have less heartache but without which
we also had no life at all...

Giving scandal? We didn't have a clue what was coming: floods of
revelation, dam-burst after dam-burst. Everything changed utterly and
our present terrible beauty was born.
There was a moment where you could see it take shape. The baby boomer
feminists and liberals had broken through to establish a bridgehead
into the modern world. The Pope's visit was intended to sucker Ireland
back into the fold. Instead, it turned out to be a watershed.

By the late 1980s, when the boomers had children, we had the youngest
population in Europe. As the economy stabilised we became consumers,
then we got rich. We became modern Europeans.
Our football fans charmed the continent. Cheap flights winged us
further afield. We sang and danced our way across the globe.

Being Irish was ultra-cool. Being Irish was sexy. I walked down
Grafton Street in 1994 and a BBC reporter stopped me and asked me
about this cool Dublin full of rockstars and models and designers. I
told her the city was full of young people and money and that when
those two combine you get sex and drugs and rock'n'roll.
And so it proved. Manhattan came to town. Sex and the city was us.
Sisters did it for themselves.

The relationships between women and society and between women and men
have changed completely. Whereas women's underachievement in education
was once a staple of feminist analysis, now the boot is on the other
foot, in Ireland as elsewhere in Europe. Women outperform men in
virtually all aspects of education. They also cheerfully exercise
their economic independence. Manolos to go.

There's a downside – young women also now out-drink young men across
(or perhaps that's under) the table. In fact, while Irish 15-year-old
males are only in fourth place in the European bingeing league, Irish
female 15-year-olds are in top spot.

The result? A media full of shock horrors about scantily clad and
drunken young women swearing, shagging, puking and fighting their way
through each successive weekend.
One priest gave us the memorable image of teenage girls in his parish
who 'only get down on their knees to give a blow job'.

Not representative of course, but the red tops love it. And it has
sparked an interesting development. Now Official Ireland choruses its
disapproval and incomprehension of its wanton daughters. Ombudsman
Emily O'Reilly triggered a chorus of cheers from even the ranks of
Tuscany last year with her sniffy disapproval of the way we have
become. And that means you, girls.

They don't quite want you to cover up, shut up and wear a veil, but
they'd like to see and hear you less. This is a common ground where
old Catholic conservatives meet embarrassed liberals in mid-life, or
perhaps parental, crisis. Now they're finding other allies. One of the
things that immigrants say, according to some reports at least, is
that they are offended by the amounts of flesh on show, by the
loudness and vulgarity of the language used and by the drinking and
assertiveness.

An interesting new challenge is emerging for Irish women as we enter
the 21st century and as we embrace the post-modern world. It's to
maintain their hard-won independence and freedom against inroads from
not only old Ireland but new Ireland as well. Interesting times ahead!