Nasty attack on the Rose festival
While I have absolutely no interest in this festival or in the spectacle of the Eurovision Song Contest, both of which receive extensive coverage from RTÉ, I accept that many people derive enjoyment from them, and that doesn’t bother me. The old adage “to each his own” applies.
Suzanne Harrington sees matters quite differently and has concocted an extremely nasty and spiteful farrago on the selection of Rose contestants.
She lampoons an imaginary Great-Uncle Bertie in the grossest possible way. She asks us to visualise an elderly man with his “colostomy bag bulging, hobbling down the red carpet.”
Ms Harrington is either insensitive to or ignorant of the fact that the majority of people who have a colostomy bag (a stoma) have undergone surgery for bowel cancer. Great-Uncle Bertie would hobble, of course, since he is old and many of the elderly have walking difficulties of arthritis.
Let’s all have a giggle at the old and infirm, confident that we, being so wonderful and witty, will never grow old or experience debilitating illness.
What kind of ‘hard-hearted Hannah’ is Suzanne Harrington that she can trample on the feelings of affected people and their relatives for the sake of an unspeakably cheap joke?
The inclusion of the word “bulging” indicates a vulgar frame of mind, unworthy of anyone given the freedom to write a weekly column in your newspaper. To advance what she must imagine is a clever piece of writing, she also conjures up another laughing-stock, the “menopausal Auntie Mary” who at the age of 55, “with all those hot flushes,” simpers on the stage of the Tralee Dome, having been made to feel “like a Celtic princess again.”
The pre-menopausal Ms Harrington may take comfort from the fact that not all menopausal women experience hot flushes, but she may not be consoled when she learns that the average age for the menopause in this part of the world is 52 and that it can occur several years earlier in women who smoke.
Auntie Mary - straight from the script of Father Ted - wouldn’t know that, of course, as this simpleton had once thought of herself as a Celtic princess, an ideal which must have been all the rage when Auntie Mary was at school around 40 years ago!
In Ms Harrington’s article - which, it seems, was meant to rubbish the Rose of Tralee contest - she again resorts to insulting caricature and has strayed into medical and biological areas which she is woefully ill-informed.
Under the flag of convenience intended to denote modernity and liberalism, Suzanne Harrington unwittingly reveals her prejudices. She set out to decry the upper age limit which is stipulated for the Rose of Tralee contestants, but got lost in the fog of her own intolerance.
At the age of 37, this woman has no first-hand experience of real life-denying and career-denying discrimination and, as latter-day feminist, has to grasp at straws. The joke is on her.
While protesting about the upper age limit for Rose candidates, she herself is shown to be cruelly ageist, with her contemptuous references to Great-Uncle Bertie and Auntie Mary.
The so-called escorts are always young men which she should very well know as they have, in the past, featured in the Irish Examiner. Her article was not only fraudulent but gratuitously offensive and arrogantly patronising.
Maureen O’Donnell
3 Haig Gardens
Boreenmanna Road
Cork
