Offensive

I once got in trouble in school for lashing out at someone who had said something derogatory about my mother. He wanted to fight me for the usual reasons boys fight and I suppose he thought he would provoke me with the kind of baseless slanders that boys will when looking for a reaction.

Not knowing then that words are only as powerful as the significance you allow them, I kicked out, catching him hard on the shin. So hard that I actually broke the skin and instead of a scrap taking place he hobbled off in pain. Unfortunately my actions had been viewed by a teacher and so I was sent to the Principals Office.

Brother Keegan, the headmaster, demanded an explanation for my actions. He knew I wasn’t a particularly aggressive child and wanted to know what had caused it. Not only was I not aggressive, I was incredibly timid and as such couldn’t bring myself to repeat what my antagonist had said about my sainted Mother. Instead, I lied.

“He called me a name sir.” My head was bowed to hide my lying eyes.

In his words, this was hardly an excuse to almost cripple a boy, (he was prone to exaggeration.) What could he have possibly called me that warranted such an attack? I wracked my brain to come up with something. I was too shy to curse in front of the head of the school so I went for something that I was occasionally called by my classmates but it never really bothered me.


“Hula Hoops, sir,” I said, still looking down.

At first he thought I was talking about the children’s toy and was confused why anybody would insult someone by calling them that. I explained that it was actually a slagging in relation to my name Holohan and that it was the crisps rather than the plaything.

“I’ve never heard of crisps being offensive,” he said

I wonder what if he’d still say that if he saw the Hunky Dory’s Rugby World Cup advertising campaign.

That might seem like a bit of a long set up for the punch line to a bad joke but I’m serious. The latest Hunky Dory’s bus shelter posters is without question one of the most offensive advertising campaigns ever. And I’m not even talking about its portrayal of women as objects of titillation and sexual entertainment. I can get past the fact that it flys in the face of any feminist who has ever stood up for herself and woman kind.

What bothers me is that it is so blatant in the fact that it has gone out of its way to be controversial and abhorrent. The marketing genius behind it wants you to be appalled. They want you to ring Joe Duffy to express your outrage. Oscar Wilde once said there is no such thing as bad publicity and in a world where this generations Ike Turner, Chris Brown, can have number one albums and Grammy nominations after pleading guilty to beating his girlfriend, he may have had a point.

The more people who complain about Hunky Dory’s the better because that means more people will recognise the name when they see it on the shelf of their supermarket and as more of us develop goldfish memories we forget the controversy and just remember the product name. You really have to wonder how much longer it is before we see this....