What a fortnight! Little did we think when we put the last issue of hotpress to bed that the David Rooney illustration that accompanied Craig Fitzsimons' piece on the scandal of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church was about to cause major uproar.
Well, it did. Liveline was inundated with calls about The Good Priest, as David had titled the illustration. I was asked to go on the programme to defend its publication, and I have to admit that I assumed I’d be on air for ten to fifteen minutes at the most, and then it’d be back to the grind. It turned into a full hour-long programme – and there wasn’t even a sign of anyone coming on air who had anything remotely supportive to say. Well, I’ll be darned!
There were lots of calls coming through too, back at HP central – but the tenor of them was very different. Here, the majority by far were supportive. A number of the callers explained that they had phoned RTE, got through to Liveline and been told that they’d be rung back. They were still waiting after the programme had finished.
In fairness to Joe Duffy and the crew, it’s quite possible that there was a far greater number who wanted to express their outrage. People seem to enjoy that sort of thing – even if, in many cases, they haven’t even bothered to take the trouble to look at the image they’re apparently mortally (not to mention morally) offended by. The one we liked best was a call that came through to the hotpress office from a woman who said that she wanted to express her disapproval in the strongest possible terms. When the staffer who took the call asked of what, she was told…of whatever it was that we were supposed to have done.
One of the callers to Liveline argued that not only was the image offensive to priests, it was also offensive to women because of the fact that the clergyman was depicted jerking off over a pornographic picture of a topless woman. What we were talking about here was a mere shape, little bigger than the size of postage stamp – but that didn’t seem to matter. It was the idea of it that was offensive. Presumably.
That kind of thinking provided a pretty appropriate backdrop to the special women’s issue of hotpress that was, by that stage, well into the final stages of planning. What is demeaning to women – or indeed to men – is, of course, a matter of taste as much as ideology. But one thing’s for sure: we’ve always been careful in hotpress to deal with the issue thoughtfully.
What we had in mind for the Women’s Issue – the one you’re holding in your hand now, that is – was a celebration of women, encompassing their contribution to music and more generally to Irish life. Whatever way you look at it, there is a constant imbalance in every aspect of public life, and not just in Ireland either – whether it’s in the arts, the media, politics or music, women still tend to have to fight that bit harder to make themselves heard.
No big deal: we wanted simply to shift the focus this fortnight and see what a variety of women would have to say about themselves, their work, their lives and, in some cases, their peers. We talked to Cecelia Ahern, Alanis Morrissette and Andrea Corr. We invited Orla Barry into the Mad Hatter’s Box, got Ivana Bacik (newly expectant, as it happens!) to address the issue of child-bearing and the challenges that are presented to women in Ireland right now, checked out what it was like At Home With Julie Feeney and asked Kim Porcelli to give us a musicianly guide to women on the cutting edge of contemporary rock.
We met some of the new Irish – women from abroad who are living here and have, in some cases at least, quite a different view of this country than most natives – and took a look at some of the things that women enjoy getting up to in their spare time. And our resident sex columnist, Anne Sexton, decided that there were some interesting things to be gleaned about women’s attitudes to sex from the new Durex Sex Survey…
What you get is a series of snapshots. It is not intended to be encyclopaedic in its scope – far from it. But we hope that it is interesting, informative, challenging – and of course fun. And there’s always next issue, in which we can pick up on any lost or missing threads.
Either way, we’d be interested in hearing from you, and how you react to what these women – and the men who in some instances are writing about them – have to say.