When It's Time To Change Import Policies

The borders are too porous, and that fact was brought home this past weekend in Monaghan. The danger of a certain export filtering across the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland must be addressed immediately.

I speak of the child beauty pageant.

Toddlers and Tiaras, from Texas with love to a populace eager to try anything that smacks of America...no matter how denigrating it might be.

Eight going on eighteen

Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant brought their circus to Castleblayney and moms across Ireland thought that they had their chance at last, to promote their daughter as the next Honey Boo Boo and reap the rewards of all that bad taste. It's understandable, to an extent. The people who settled in the Appalachian region of the United States came from Ulster, so it's almost like their descendants were returning the favor.

Thanks a million, really, but no thanks.

The original venue for the pageant cancelled when they learned exactly what sort of thing the Universal Royalty people were about. Sexualizing young girls, putting them in full make up and big hair, is not generally seen as a desirable activity. Given the history of child sexual abuse in Ireland, making children up to look like grown women has a certain cachet that is not acceptable.

The pageant organizers make money off the contest in the entry fees, only part of which are returned to the participants as prizes for being the most non-child-like in appearance. There is an entire industry devoted to bringing out the inner Lolita in every little girl, and one firm has determined that the market is ripe for development in Ireland, of all places. Sure people aren't running to Mass every Sunday, but they haven't escaped from decades of moral principles that are instilled from birth by mothers who were raised the same way.

Instead of the Bracken Court Hotel in Dublin, the competition was staged in the beer garden of Corrigan's Kitchen in County Monaghan, which seems more appropriate of a venue for an Irish-based festival. That it had to move out of the Republic to find a place to hold the contest may perhaps be a testament to Irish mammies disapproving of such a thing, or there was not a suitable place anywhere else to put on the show.

If they had called it the Lovely Girls Competition, and asked a few local priests to judge the contest, maybe then they wouldn't have made such a fuss at the Bracken Court Hotel. Some things imported direct from the States must be modified to fit the market, which will be devastated if something isn't done to monitor what's coming in from across the Atlantic.