A female president for Italy? - maybe in the 25th century14/02/2010
At the bar down by the fishermen’s port, two Saturdays in a row we run into the local Tom Jones. Sitting with his wife and her friend, he stares at us through the haze of his cigarette, without removing his shades. He wants to know where we are from. He is delighted to know we are Irish and not English, whom he dismisses with a flick of his cigarette as boring and unfriendly. Do we like it here? he wants to know, and beams at our positive reply. We know better than to mention the negative sides of living here; the pollution from the refinery, the filth around the smouldering rubbish heaps every 100metres, the lechy old men. Ahem … what are relationships like in Ireland, he demands to know, abandoning the small talk to cut to the quick. I mean, who wears the trousers? He leans forward in his chair, keen to see our reaction. We both proclaim the equality prevalent in male-female relationships in Ireland, unlike what we see here. Aha! He gets excited, and what is it like here? We both kno...