Double Take:Now that Fianna Fáil and the Greens are in bed together, both sides should wear pyjamas, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
Now that Fianna Fáil and the Greens are in bed together, both sides should wear pyjamas. On the one hand we are entitled to a certain level of propriety, and the amount of sexual imagery used to describe the new Coalition has been striking. Like most sexual imagery, this has been just a teeny little bit self-aggrandising to the male partner in the new relationship - and that, of course, will be Fianna Fáil. I would have said that Fianna Fáil is the Joan Collins of Irish politics - remarkable simply for surviving so long in a tough business - but then I am a girl. From the start, Fianna Fáil has assumed that it is the male partner in the new relationship and has embraced, with disturbing enthusiasm, the role of a raddled old roué slavering over a nubile bride.
On Wednesday, the day before the Greens met in the Mansion House to approve the Coalition deal, a Fianna Fáil insider told journalist Sam Smyth that "there's two kinds of women in the world: there's those who do, and those who haven't been asked properly". Which just goes to show you that Austin Powers will never be dead as long as the double-breasted suit is alive.
It was also informally reported that Fianna Fáilers were saying that, for the Greens, any coalition must be like getting into bed with Warren Beatty. Warren Beatty! In your dreams, sweetheart. Peter Sutcliffe, more like.
The pyjamas are still a good idea. It's more difficult to lie when you are wearing pyjamas. Pyjamas show that you have nothing to hide. They also, according to pyjama critics, show that you are going nowhere and are a slob at heart.
We must thank Joe McGuinness, the headmaster of St Matthew's Primary School in Short Strand, Belfast, for putting pyjamas on the national and international agenda. According to McGuinness, he was faced with up to 50 mothers at his school gates each morning, all wearing their pyjamas. It is a striking picture when you think about it. And McGuinness did think about it. He wrote to the mothers, urging them to desist from wearing pyjamas when dropping their children to school. "It's about respect and setting the children a bad example," he told the Andersonstown News.
A very nice lady at St Matthew's Primary told The Irish Times that McGuinness was unavailable. When asked if they had been tortured with press inquiries since his remarks, she replied in the affirmative. "There has been no further comment made on the matter," she said.
But too late, too late. The international media were on, as it were, the pyjama case. "Just how casual is too casual?" asked the London Times in a long article. (The answer seems to be shorts and cleavage in the office - and not necessarily on the same person.) But the Andersonstown News had spotted the pyjama trend - which it named All Day Pyjama Syndrome (ADPS) - as far back as 2003.
No one is sure when it hit the Republic. But Dublin mothers have been bringing their kids to school while wearing their pyjamas for some time. One particularly elegant woman admitted last week that she had driven the kids to school wearing her pyjamas for years, accessorised only by a cup of coffee on the dashboard. So what had happened to stop her? "One day I ran out of petrol," she says.
The thing is that we're going to have to decide what the quantifiable difference is between the tracksuit, and other forms of modern leisurewear, and pyjamas. Joe McGuinness seems to have very definite ideas on that one, but as someone who is writing this wearing combat trousers and a fleece, I am not so sure. Dress-down Fridays have a lot to answer for, with their assumption that smart office wear is somehow oppressive, but it is the home workers who have brought the barrier between formal and casual down around our unwashed ears. You think you're sitting down for a brief work session and the next thing you know you're in the supermarket, frantically buying dinner in the sweatshirt you slept in last week. Of course, the sweatshirt has been in the washing machine several times since; things are not that bad yet. But you can see how the mothers of Short Strand say "to hell with it" and keep all their good clothes for going to the pub.
"There is an old word called slovenliness, which means messy and lazy," Joe McGuinness told the Andersonstown News. "I think this can be applied to people who spend the day dressed in pyjamas." You have to say that he is a brave man.
In Shanghai, apparently, people promenade in the evenings wearing all types of nightwear and no one thinks anything of it. Perhaps pyjamas, with all their implications of vulnerability and sincerity and a lack of personal ambition, should be permitted as daywear only to parliamentary politicians; it is the rest of us who should wear double-breasted suits.