{"id":214204,"date":"2025-12-28T07:51:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T07:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/214204\/"},"modified":"2025-12-28T07:51:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T07:51:09","slug":"from-statues-to-skorts-irelands-talent-for-preoccupation-with-the-wrong-things-is-intact-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/214204\/","title":{"rendered":"From statues to skorts, Ireland\u2019s talent for preoccupation with the wrong things is intact \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

By the time the end of year round-ups<\/a> roll round, some of the stories that preoccupied us during the previous 12 months already seem to belong to a different era. These are the news stories that shouldn\u2019t have been news \u2013 not because the media should not have covered them, but because it\u2019s hard to believe these were real events and not a fever dream. <\/p>\n

Ireland<\/a> has always had talent for getting worked up about all the wrong things \u2013 particularly, it seems, where women are concerned \u2013 and this year was no exception. <\/p>\n

Molly Malone<\/p>\n

Ireland finally began to take sexual assaults on women seriously last spring. About time, you might think \u2013 except there was a caveat. A tiny one. The sexual assaults in question did not involve real women, or even a real woman, but a bronze statue of Molly Malone<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We have a long history of projecting all sorts of values on to statues in this country. Forty years ago, it was the statues of Our Lady that were seen to sway, raise their hands and cry blood read tears in places like Ballinspittle and Asdee. In the mid-1980s, moving statues became a battleground for the piety of a nation that found itself squarely divided into believers and sceptics, and a distraction, or maybe a purification, from the awful events in Tralee, where the revelations of the Kerry babies<\/a> tribunal were laying bare the darkest corners of the Irish psyche.<\/p>\n

In 2025, a year when woman after woman bravely waived her anonymity to go public with stories of violence and abuse, because they had had enough of the collective silence on this issue, a bronze statue of a voluptuous Molly Malone became an unlikely receptacle for anger about sexual assault. The groping was mostly being perpetrated in broad daylight by tourists who seemed to think that sexually assaulting statues is a quirky Irish tradition up there with kissing rocks, getting drunk and standing vigil outside Wilson\u2019s Hospital School. <\/p>\n

The great groping crisis lodged itself into the national consciousness in the first six months of the year in a way that actual sexual assaults on actual women rarely do. Campaigners who wanted the statue moved safely away from the grasping paws of tourists<\/a> pointed out that children shouldn\u2019t be exposed to daylight sexual assault, even of a statue. And Molly was, they insisted, \u201ca national treasure\u201d who deserved better. <\/p>\n

\"\"Molly’s minders: why the famous Dublin statue is being protected from tourists <\/p>\n

Of course, Molly Malone isn\u2019t a national treasure; she is a figment of our cultural imagination and a kitsch landmark. It\u2019s also worth pointing out that if children are going to be exposed to the normalisation of sexual harassment, the device in their pocket is a more likely medium than a bronze statue.<\/p>\n

In the event, far more effort was put into protecting the statue from sexual assault than doing anything about the women routinely being groped and harassed on our streets or subjected to unspeakable violence in their homes. Over the summer, Dublin City Council hired stewards to stand around and protect Molly, and hotly debated the merits of putting flower beds around the plinth at a cost of \u20ac20,000. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0More than half of women have experienced sexual violence during lifetime – CSOOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, research by Red C<\/a> in October found that, in the past year alone, 19 per cent of women aged 18-34 \u2013 nearly one in five \u2013 had experienced sexual violence. A national survey in early 2025 found that 41 per cent of women have been harassed or intimidated while out walking or running. But look, as long as Molly is shielded from handsy tourists, the women of Ireland can all feel a bit safer.<\/p>\n

A woman principal<\/p>\n

Castleknock College<\/a>, an all-boys fee-paying school in Dublin, made the news<\/a> in October for doing something shockingly progressive. A mere 190 years into its existence, it appointed a woman principal. Is this a sign to the women of Ireland that one of us might one day get to be minister for finance or even president of the GAA? Or \u2013 who knows \u2013 a priest? Don\u2019t panic, Pope Leo<\/a>; I\u2019m just kidding.<\/p>\n

Skorts<\/p>\n

The blazing row over whether camogie players should be permitted to wear plain old shorts instead of awkward, uncomfortable skorts \u2013 which erupted during the Leinster senior camogie semi-final and rapidly ascended to what Malachy Clerkin has called \u201cSaipan proportions\u201d \u2013 was mystifying at the time and is no less baffling now. It was like opening the papers one morning to discover that the world was up in arms because Naomi Osaka had forgotten to put on her corset and bloomers to play at Wimbledon.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Down with this skort of thing: Why are we talking about the long-rumbling issue all over again?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

A brief recap in case you missed it (unlikely, since it dominated the news for days and was covered everywhere from the Financial Times to The New York Times): Dublin and Kilkenny players decided to take a stand<\/a> on the back of a GPA report<\/a> which showed that 70 per cent of them felt uncomfortable wearing a skort. So they decided that anyone who wished to should wear shorts; anyone who wanted to wear a skort could. So far, so uncontentious, you might think. But if you did, you wouldn\u2019t be reckoning on the GAA\u2019s nostalgia for a time when women knew their place and dressed like the \u201cladies\u201d it still insists we are.<\/p>\n

The issue ended up being the subject of a Special Congress on May 22nd at Croke Park, where a resolution was overwhelmingly passed in favour of allowing players to choose what they wear. The fact that there even had to be a discussion \u2013 let alone a Special Congress, a secret ballot and weeks of media coverage \u2013 about whether it was fine to force women to wear a garment that most see as uncomfortable, ugly and signalling them out as somehow not full athletes tells you everything you need to know about the GAA\u2019s attitude to gender equality. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By the time the end of year round-ups roll round, some of the stories that preoccupied us during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":214205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111295,61,60,35233,92070,43,106552,111294],"class_list":["post-214204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-castleknock-college","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jennifer-o-connell","tag-molly-malone","tag-news","tag-review-2025","tag-skorts-controversy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}