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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