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OPINION
TRINITY NEWS January 13, 2009
Offensive Ents slogan is a red RAG to a bull Hilary Allen Caoilfhionn Nic Conmara Niall Sherry IF YOU are a class rep, or in any way involved in the Students’ Union, you will have been asked to wear a t-shirt with the slogan “I’m on the RAG” stamped across the chest this week. For those of you who don’t know (and, in a college that strives to be international, there are plenty of people for whom this is the case) to be “on the rag” is not to be on a major night out, it is to have a period. This is a step too far in the pursuit of publicity. This slogan was chosen by a small, appointed committee, who appear to be answerable to no one in particular. Unsurprisingly, this committee is all-
male. Whether or not this is an offensive slogan is of course up for debate. For those who suffer while on their period, or who find it embarrassing (as many do – it’s hardly a topic that comes up in casual conversation) it could be seen as hugely offensive; for those who have never had a period it may make no difference. Personally I find the fact that is completely targeted towards one gender and designed to draw a laugh from the discomfort, and perhaps pain, of that gender outrageously offensive. Others may disagree. Either way, it’s a debate that should have been had prior to now. When the Students’ Union, of which we are all members, is throwing its considerable weight and funding behind a drive, it should
“We’ll never see the men of the SU walking around in SHAG week t-shirts with ‘I SUFFER FROM ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION’ emblazoned across the front, no matter how funny the female population might find it.” take care to at least try and avoid being blindly offensive to 60% of the student population. It might be seen as ‘ranty feminism’ to say that it’s typical misogyny from a body whose upper echelons are still primarily dominated by men, but let’s face it – even though they’d draw a lot of attention, we’ll never see the men of the SU walking around in SHAG week t-shirts with “I SUFFER
FROM ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION” emblazoned across the front, no matter how much attention that might draw, or how funny the female population might find it. Either way, it is evident that this slogan is crude, puerile and designed as nothing more than a cheap stunt. Complete with stickers. The only reasoning that I have been
able to receive from the Students’ Union is that, while crude, it raises attention and therefore does its job. Similar to SHAG week, apparently. There are a few things wrong with this logic, notably that SHAG week aims to raise awareness of sexual health and gender. To promote safe “shagging” practices and to provide information about “shaggingly” transmitted infections. The slogan “I’m on the RAG” has nothing to do with Raising A Grand. It has nothing to do with promoting philanthropic values or feeling, it is simply a tool being used to grab attention. The main tenet of charities is respect towards human dignity. This campaign is an affront to this aim and thus RAG week’s entire purpose in the first place. Why bother with an offensive RAG week
at all? The argument could of course be made that it is managing to achieve said aim on the very basis of the fact that I am writing this article. But there are better ways of raising awareness. There are better ways of informing people. When I look at a t-shirt with “I’m on the RAG” splashed across the front I do not consider what I may be doing in order to support the cause; instead, I think about periods. We expect more from RAG week, and more from a Students’ Union that sets out to represent us all. We expect more than cheap jokes and childish slogans. We expect better and I think underneath my personal distaste for this slogan, expecting better is why I felt the need to raise this issue and write this article.
IN PROFILE: DARREN MCCALLIG
Irreverent Reverend Dean of Residence, Rev Darren McCallig enlightens Conor Gannon about his recent series of eyebrowraising sermons based around TV shows, and making his voice heard amidst the din of secular life in Trinity FORMER GALWAY student union leader and current Anglican Chaplain, Darren Mc Callig is the epitome of enthusiasm. Determined to make students aware that the Chapel is a place of welcome, he is a man who wants to make a statement to the world. “Competition is tough with the market leader these days” he says, jokingly, as he refers to his Roman Catholic counterparts. “We’ve got to make our voice heard even if it’s only heard by Trinity’s niche market, the Anglicans”. In Trinity term, Mc Callig caused something of a stir with the controversial titles of his sermons. From “The Gospel according to Sex in the City” to “The Gospel according to Fr Ted”, he wanted to do something which would grab people’s attention, and that it did. Interviewed by 2FM and appearing on RTÉ, he was determined to demonstrate that links can and should be made between the secular and the spiritual. So what better place to start than his favourite television programmes? As his catchphrase goes, “our faith is 2000 years old, but our thinking doesn’t have to be”. Born in Claremorris in Co Mayo in 1974, faith was an important aspect of family for McCallig, and it was shown more in deeds than in words. He speaks with great admiration of his parents’ willingness to open their home to children who needed emergency foster
care. But similar to most people, he challenged the faith he understood in his youth. Understanding the Bible in the way he did as a child no longer made sense. For many of his friends the next step was to give up, but Darren was determined to seek a new understanding of his identity as a Christian. A chaplain at University College Galway, Rev Robert McCarthy, who is now the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral and also well able to raise a few eyebrows with his preaching, played a pivotal role in Darren’s spiritual development. McCarthy inspired him to delve deeper into that broad church tradition within Anglicanism which is at once scholarly and open to new perspectives. He took it to heart and was ordained a priest. “Quite frankly, I sometimes wish I wasn’t a clergyman”, he says. “I find it so frustrating when people who don’t know me automatically assume that I must be homophobic, misogynistic, fundamentalist anti-sex and antiintellectual nutcase.” “What’s more, they assume I think non-believers and people of other religions are all going to hell.” Looking at the Church, McCallig sees an institution which has contributed greatly to human flourishing over the last two thousand years. He also sees an institution which has been, and still is in many ways, guilty of a long list of crimes including the abuse and exploitation of women, discrimination against gay
“I find it so frustrating when people who don’t know me automatically assume that I must be a homophobic, misogynistic, fundamentalist, antisex and anti-intellectual nutcase.”
people, persecution of people of other faiths and the most terrible abuses of power. But breaking down those negative images of the church is the first step in trying to reach out to the student population, Darren believes. “We’re very lucky in Trinity to be able to play to our strengths. First, we have a beautiful Chapel in which to celebrate our liturgies and second, we have an outstanding musical tradition, with the Chapel Choir delighting the ears of worshippers and enticing passers-by to come into the Chapel to sample some of their heavenly melodies.” In good Protestant tradition, Darren emphasizes the importance of preaching in order to convert hearts and minds.
“On the morning of my sermon on the Shawshank Redemption, I was delighted to be met by a family after the service who told me that that watched the film the previous night, having read about it in the Irish Times.” For those who may not be as well prepared for their Sunday worship, McCallig reminds us that the preaching doesn’t have to be confined to the pulpit. If you miss a sermon you can download it from the chaplaincy website and listen to it at your leisure. Around fifty percent of students declare their religious affiliation when they register. Out of that, McCallig estimates that about five percent are Anglican. “When you get down to the proportion of that group who live on
Campus and who would be likely attend a service on a Sunday, it’s a wonder we have a congregation at all”, he exclaims. “It’s wonderful to see that the numbers in the congregation are increasing”. How does he feel about stepping into the shoes of the former Anglican chaplain, who was renowned for his liturgical innovations? McCallig points out that each chaplain brings his own strengths and weaknesses. Trinity wasn’t always a place of bells and smells, he observes. “I think there’s a lot to be said for traditional Anglican liturgy. It speaks for itself. The music and the setting do the rest.” So is there anything interesting in the pipeline? “You’ll just have to wait and see.”
Failure to bring home bacon butchers export market Fionnuala Barrett THE DUST kicked up in December with the short-lived pork scandal has now begun to settle, but some of the wounds sustained during the scuffle may take a while longer to heal. Quite apart from the approximately 1,800 jobs which were threatened just two weeks before Christmas, others have taken a battering because of this scandal. Galtee, for instance, will probably be lying low for the foreseeable. A caller to Joe Duffy revealed that before the warnings about pork had been made, she had ordered one of Galtee’s “Traditional Irish Breakfast” hampers for a far-flung relative who craved a taste of the old country. Upon contacting Galtee to cancel her order, she was told that the meat in these hampers is not Irish at all, but sourced from the EU and the US.
Their website has since dropped “Irish” from their name. However, it is the government who will prove most affected by the fiasco. This is just the most recent in a litany of high-profile messes in recent months, including, but by no means limited to, the medical card furore, the vigorous back-pedalling over promises made about primary class sizes and the overall rabbit-in-the-headlights response to the credit crisis. The governmental response to the dioxin scare was unsatisfactory in just about every aspect. To begin with, the routine checks which led to the discovery of the presence of dioxin in meat had not been carried out at the factory in question for over a year. This alone should have been enough to cause uproar: upon what, exactly, does Ireland base its claims to be a producer of “quality” meat when checks
are so infrequent that they’re not even annual? The Food Safety Authority (FSAI), in an effort to be safe rather than sorry, chose to recall all pig meat rather than to rely on the traceability system to choose only the meat known to have come into contact with the contaminated feed. It was a move which prompted Alan Matthews, professor of European Agricultural Policy in Trinity, to express wonder at the fact that pigs which never came into contact with this feed weren’t getting to supermarket shelves. Although beef is traceable back to factory and farm, as it has been since the BSE crisis of the 90s, pig meat, though traceable to the factory, generally cannot be traced further back because the pork industry does not enjoy the lavish funding afforded to beef producers. Thus out of only ten farmers affected by the contaminated feed, four
hundred producers suffered the effects of the product recall. If nothing else, the debacle has proven beyond all doubt that the traceability of every pack of pig meat – claims on the packs which might lead you to believe that the worker in your local Spar knew every individual pig farmer by name – was a comforting myth which, when put to the test, spectacularly failed to yield results to anyone’s benefit. As food writer Georgina Campbell put it at the time, “There’s this awful feeling that there’s no-one in control.” Such a feeling only escalated when, resulting from the conflicted conferences, warnings were similarly confused and apparently contradictory, keen to reassure the public that pork was not dangerous and yet insistent that it had to be destroyed. In turn, the consumer response was at ambivalent and, in many cases, sceptical.
While it has yet to be proved whether the scare significantly weakened the current government’s popularity or perceived ability to keep its head in times of trouble, it can be guessed that this latest fiasco has not helped its already ailing stock. The comparisons drawn between the latest mess, under inexperienced Brendan Smith, and the Foot and Mouth epidemic of 2001, which was handled with far greater aplomb by a seasoned Minister for Agriculture, Joe Walsh, have opened up Cowen’s kitchen cabinet of friends and supporters, to even greater criticism, while better-qualified rivals wait on the sidelines. The fallout abroad from the crisis has yet to be fully realised, though there was a foretaste of the reaction with South Africa’s swift move to ban all EU meat and dairy products. The ban has now been lifted on EU beef and dairy but at
time of writing still remains in place on Irish pork. As the chorus of commentators have been unanimous in affirming, good reputations take years to build and bad ones years to overcome; in some cases, a bad reputation never entirely goes away. The consequences of this latest dent to Ireland’s agricultural reputation are not to be underestimated, particularly facing into the year of the big slump, when sterling has taken a 30 percent dip on its standing at the start of the year. Considering that the UK makes up more than 40 percent of Ireland’s food export market, Ireland needs to keep its reputation as clean as possible in the coming year if it is to weather the inhospitable economic tide on the horizon. On the home front and abroad, the pork scandal makes for a thoughtprovoking, if none too positive, augury for Ireland in 2009.