Sheep, shite and desolation. It was to get away from all that, that a group of women camped overnight on Sliabh na mBan and had a discussion which resulted in the formation of the Irish Countrywomen's Association. Their aim was to radically improve the lot of their members. They wanted simple things like running water in their homes. That was a revolutionary innovation nearly a hundred years ago.

One woman recalled the humiliation and

despair which she felt at the prospect of her daughter's visit home from America. Letters about the wonders of life over there had caused her to see her own home in a new light and what she saw was shabby, drear, and backward as a pigsty. Any hope that her daughter would consider remaining in Ireland was, realistically, shattered.

Almost a century later, there is still reason for concern in rural Ireland that the young, having shook the dust of the village off their feet and seen the marvels of the New World, will opt to nevermore come back home. One of the stunning things is that the marvels are available in Ireland but not to females. There is, for instance, a car outside virtually every home. You will seldom see a female driving it, and on Sundays you can safely bet that you'll not see a female in it, even as a passenger.

Sundays, you see, are days of rest for farming families and on Sundays, farming men take their rest as spectators at, or participants in, sporting occasions. Though women are fast taking their place there too, it is still a heavily male preoccupation. And there is just no argument about such things. Sport is sacred. The car goes where the man wants to go.

The woman stays behind. There is no bus service. The nearest centre of population is about five miles away. She might as well be back in the middle-ages when the horizons of the peasantry were bounded by such an achingly small perimeter. The same facts of life obtain for many city women, particularly those in the dublin suburbs, and things are arguably worse for them, since rural women have at least the pleasures of a country walk at their feet.

Women on welfare in Tallaght haven't seen Dublin city centre, on a Sunday, in years. The left-bank in Temple Bar might as well be in Paris for all they ever get to see it. Many don't even know that we have a left-bank in the capital of the nation. It's 1993 and they haven't the price of the bus on the day of rest.

INVENTING THE CLAMP

Even if the men were to collapse with a collective visitation of gall-stone trouble, it wouldn't make much difference to the female Sunday. An astonishing number of women do not know how to drive the family car, and this in an era when communities go to great pains to meet the needs and desires of adolescent, mainly male, joy-riders.

Boys go out and steal Porsches so we beat our breasts in a welter of sympathy and compassion for their impossible dreams, buy old bangers, arrange driving lessons on drag-circuits for them and commiserate with their poverty. Women stay at home, all unnoticed, up to their oxters in baby-shit and sheep-shit, contemplating brieze-blocks and a collie dog crossing the haggard.

The loneliness of the long-distance rural and surburban woman is one of the scandals of our time. It is more than scandalous - it is stupid. The lunacy of this situation is never more obvious than when the man of the house falls critically ill, as men, perfect creatures though they be, occasionally do.

He writhes in agony on the floor and the keys to the car, his only chance of salvation - especially down the country where an ambulance must come from up to fifty miles away - are as mythically useless as the keys to the gates of heaven where he is due shortly to arrive because the woman of the house can't drive a car which has been outside the house for decades.

And men laugh about this state of affairs? They have practically signed their own suicide note and they make jokes about women drivers. Hundreds of thousands of pounds are spent conducting surveys which show that most women don't know how to put on the spare tyre. Millions are due to be spent, to make up for divorce, on welfare for women whose marriages have broken down.

Men will hand over as much again in alimony, crying all the way to the bank, moaning that they gave their wives everything, wondering why she claimed that she was lonely and isolated, protesting that, sure, they even drove her to the supermarket every Friday night.

And what else would you expect of the fools, I asked myself sourly, the day I watched the police nobble a car on the freeway during rush-hour? Some genius, probably a woman, changed life for the better thousands of years ago by inventing the wheel, and man responded in the twentieth century by inventing the clamp.

Go tell it on the mountain, sisters.