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Memories of playpen days to stop you acting the goat

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The sight of King Puc being hoisted into a Kilorglin heatwave recently left a nagging question at the back of the mind – where have I seen that before?

I’d been to the Puc Fair back in the nineties – in the middle of a General Election, if memory serves me right – so I knew I’d seen an ancestor of this year’s goat. But this was more to do with the cage that the poor King was confined to.

And then it dawned on me; it looked eerily close to our old playpen.

Now before Childline gets retrospectively involved, the playpen – needless to say – wasn’t made of steel, and it didn’t have bars across the top to fully enclose you in something you’d more readily associate with US operators in Guantanamo Bay.

The playpen, unlike the goat’s cage, was also left on ground level, indoors in the shade, and I’m sure the parents never contemplated a three-day bar extension that would only draw too much of a crowd to gawk in at us – possibly in every sense of that word.

But the playpen still constituted a form of prison; a place of confinement where a toddler could do no harm.

The name alone tells you everything you need to know; the emphasis was always on the pen part – as in a segregated area for livestock or as defined in the dictionary, a small enclosure for domestic animals – and the play element was a fig leaf of comfort to assuage your guilt at putting your little tyke in a four-foot-by-four-foot prison.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune:

Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App

Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app

The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

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