Ever since the Famine, the Irish male has been like a tomcat without his claws, and the proof is in men's pyjamas, writes Michael Harding

I was sitting in the foyer of the Park Hotel waiting for two businessmen. We had planned a light lunch. They arrived after a heavy morning extracting money from a bank, and doing up the paper work on a property they had just bought.

They drank glasses of water, with ice and lemon slices. They joked about how good life was, and thanked God for all his blessings. Then they gossiped a little about the damage alcohol does to the system. And finally, as we tucked into chicken-chilli wraps, they got down to the subject of tomcats.

"My girlfriend has one," the younger man said. "A fierce go on him for sex. Would go out the window every night and come back with no ears, or no tail, or his throat all cut. She was always taking him to the vet. And eventually the vet suggested she get him castrated."

My friend left down his chicken wrap and leaned back in his seat before continuing.

"Ah Jesus," he said, "You'd want to see the poor fekker now. Sits there looking into the fire all evening. It's fekkin sad."

His friend butted in.

"Do you know what they do in America?" he asked. "They take the front claws out. To stop them scraping the furniture."

We were all shocked at that revelation.

"Jesus," he said. "How is a poor cat expected to catch a mouse? He'd have to box it to death!"

There was a young man in a suit at another table. He sat waiting for his phone to ring. A clean-shaven lad, with glasses and freckles. He looked very worried. The mobile phone rested on the tablecloth. The briefcase rested at his feet. The jacket of his suit hung on the back of the chair. He was staring at the phone. He looked like he was on the verge of tears.

Eventually he was taken out of his misery by the chords of Beethoven's fifth symphony, announcing an incoming call. He grabbed the phone, leaped from the chair, stared out the window and said: "Where are you now? Oh yes! Oh Jesus, I see you!"

And in walked a dark-haired woman in a long cheesecloth dress and an orange shawl. She too had a mobile. And sunglasses. And I half-recognised her from some folk group on the television.

"There you are," she said into her mobile, laughing, and pointing at him.

Her adoring boy fell into her embrace, and was almost lost in the folds of her garments, and the clouds of her patchouli.

If there had been an open fire, my two friends and I might have stared into it. But there wasn't, so we just ate our chicken wraps in silence.

After lunch I drove back through town. There were a few young men stripped to the waist, on construction sites, as they mixed cement, carried blocks, and guided the cranes that swung the sheets of pre-cast concrete into position.

Their bodies were lithe, and evenly tanned. Not a pot-belly in sight.

Twenty years ago the Irish male was a despised creature - despised mostly by the Irish female. And I suppose you couldn't blame her. In those days a flush of white flesh on building site was as predictable as the song of the cuckoo, or the blossoming of the May bush. Boys went red by lunchtime, which was called dinnertime, and, by three in the afternoon, the naked bodies on the scaffolding sizzled like rashers under a grill.

And in the evenings, men would walk abroad in short trousers and black shoes, their socks patterned with diamonds or polka dots.

That was before Adonis arrived from continental Europe; before the colour and style of African men swept across Irish streets.

For Irish men, the Famine was the deciding moment of complete inadequacy and failure, when they lost any remnant of machismo that had remained in the soul since Brian Boru's sudden death. The nation is still recovering from that psychic castration.

The grace and eloquence of Irish manhood died in the Famine. The phallus withered, and within a few generations had mutated into the sterile icon of a Celtic samurai, gawking out the window of the GPO, with a rifle. I often regret not pursuing my sociology studies far enough to produce a thesis on the subject. It would be fascinating to do a scientific analysis of Irish men's pyjamas throughout the 20th century, examining changing styles, and their debilitating effect on the female libido.