Country Living with Francis Farragher

Political correctness was never a term I was familiar with as a kid, and maybe just as well, thinking back on some of the stuff we used to come out with.

We learned nursery rhymes where the ‘N word’ featured through 10 verses in a row without even having the remotest clue this was offensive in any way.

Travellers for examples during the 1960s were referred to with the other T word which at the time, to the best of my childhood memory, did not have any derogatory connotation.

They were regular callers to our house when around the area and never left emptyhanded due to the good nature of my late mother.

Euan McColl, that great singer/songwriter of the liberal left even used the old T word in his tribute song to the life and ways of Travellers contained the line:

‘All you freeborn men of the travelling people,

Every tinker, rolling stone and gypsy rover,”

With the passing of time of course, we’ve all had to clean up our vocabularies and with good reason too. Frequently, words used to describe people of a certain colour, religion, way of life or sexual orientation were used in the context of prejudice and hatred which just had to change.

I’ve often said in social discourse over a pint of plain that Ireland is a far nicer country to live in now that it was when I was a child of the 1960s.

This was still the era of corporal punishment in schools – and worse too in cases as has been well documented – while woe betide any single young woman who got pregnant, or any family who had a member with a mental health issue or one of sexual orientation differing from the norm.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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