Gay, proud and ready for a joyful Taoiseach
Yes, I come out before all of you and confess that I attended the Gay Bachelor festival in Ballybunion some 40 shameful years ago, not just once or twice, but three times and during those wild days in The Kingdom I was, in the idiom of that era, as gay as a gander. It is extremely difficult for me to confess to this truth.
There is more than that to my pain and shame and suffering today.
It is a fact that the alphabet has been the tool of my trade all my working life. I raised a family by wielding the alphabet the way a carpenter uses a hammer.
I might have started off as a hack using the alphabet to construct the fundamental 600 or 700 words which are sufficient to relate most stories but,in all fairness, I went to the trouble of learning at least 500 more bigger words and phrases and studying how to spell them properly.
In that context, accordingly, it is extremely painful to have to confess that it is the simple three-letter word “gay” which has finally exposed me.
Most of you will not believe me now but I swear that when I was a gay bachelor in Ballybunion all those decades ago any declaration that one was gay had a totally different meaning than nowadays. I don’t understand it at all.
The word ‘gay’ has mutated totally.
The thousands of gay bachelors I joined in Ballybunion were united in their hot pursuit of pints, women and fish and chips from the late night takeaways.
Since I am in the confessional box now I further confess, on one of my most enjoyable nights there, to spending kissing time in a hayshed on the edge of town with a lovely young woman from Ballydavid who is surely a genteel granny nowadays who would deny ever having kissed a boyo like me in any hayshed.
Again let it be said the encounter was all very chaste and Catholic and afterwards I walked her back to the Anglia where her married sister and her husband were waiting to bring her safely home away from all the gay bachelors. The pure truth again.
When I was growing up in the North it is fair to say that any man who was described as “a gay boyo ... as gay as a goose” was a man known to be a lively character who was extremely interested in women day and night and who, after he married and fathered a family, was still vulnerable to straying from the straight and narrow matrimonial path of the Thirties and Forties if given the slightest opportunity.
There was one such uncle in our family and he featured heavily in the Trimmings of the family rosary for years after he eventually had to flee the island just ahead of a posse of vengeful small town husbands whose wives he had led astray.
As I explained above, the little three-letter word has dramatically changed and mutated in recent years to the point where I now avoid it like the plague when writing yarns, lest I accidentally cause offence to anyone.
That being said I also have to say I was delighted to see a banner headline on the front page of this noble newspaper a few mornings ago. It used the largest letters in the print box to proclaim, “WE’RE READY FOR A GAY TAOISEACH”. And I cheered out loud.
Because, ye know well, after all these years of hardship and austerity and unemployment and emigration and worthy political leaders all wearing sad and doleful faces and preaching misery, we do so badly need a concentrated infusion of gaiety. And if it takes a gay Taoiseach to provide that then I’m all for it.
Let’s wait and see how things pan out.
