The remarks made recently by Judge John Garavan in the Galway District Court about the type of girls frequenting the city's nightclubs have attracted a lot of comment.
"I hear from respectable young men that they can't meet nice, respectable girls in these nightclubs. The girls they meet there are dreadful, at least that is what I am told," the judge said when refusing the extension of late opening hours already granted to one Galway club.
Judge Garavan also suggested that people who want "a night out" should go out earlier - at a "respectable" hour: "Of course, if the truth be known, you won't find respectable people out at all hours. It's uncivilised and a lot of them just won't go out."
Here in Dublin, in the fashionable and rather grand social circles where we media folk move, much derision has been poured on Judge Garavan's remarks.
The word "fuddy-duddy" has been heard more than once. Power-lunch meetings in swish city restaurants and dinner parties from Howth to Ballsbridge (omitting most of the intervening parts of the city) have already resounded with comical accounts and re-tellings of the incident.
The bars of the Morrison, the Fitzwilliam, the Merrion, the Shelbourne and the Clarence hotels have been the scenes of much Galway-linked hilarity between the clinking of crystal glasses.
Along Grafton Street, from Bewley's to Brown Thomas, witty remarks at the good judge's expense have been exchanged by the well-dressed boulevardiers and elegant business ladies.
Kildare Street has wisely kept its counsel, wary of alienating any respectable voters, but some stifled giggles have certainly been noted in the Dail bar, and muted laughter has been heard even down at the Law Library.
Dublin's clubland itself has been the source of some of the cruellest jibes.
It is all rather embarrassing.
The judge's pronouncements, and the mind-set they reflect, have also confirmed in the minds of Dubliners that despite Galway's decade-long efforts to promote itself as a sophisticated city, it remains little more than a hick town: an oversized provincial centre with narrow interests and narrower streets, closed minds, a strong xenophobic streak, a distrust of the new, a complete lack of any aesthetic interest or attraction, and not a clue when it comes to living life to the full.
Most embarrassing of all is the obvious survival of peasant redneck notions of morality and respectability despite the superficial would-be-city veneer of modern thinking and behaviour.
Indeed, "early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise" is a saying that many modern Dubliners believe originated at Eyre Square, under the benign gaze of Padraig O Conaire, possibly in the mind of a horrified citizen witnessing some of the first regular scenes of Galway debauchery as he made his sober way home to his respectable family at twenty-five minutes past nine.
For us sophisticated types, the apparent comedy in Judge Garavan's well-intentioned remarks springs from his use of the words "respectable" and "nice" in conjunction with "girls" (when we would use the phrase "young women"). Were any of us genuine, ultra-cool city dwellers to speak of "a respectable girl", all of our friends would instantly know we were using the phrase in a deeply ironic, postmodernist way, and snigger approvingly.
On the other hand, were we to describe a girl - beg pardon, young woman (the rural origins do betray themselves on occasion despite all one's efforts) - as "dreadful", as Judge Garavan did, we should mean no more than that the woman tended to loud, exhibitionist and probably vulgar public behaviour, none of it in the least objectionable. Basically, we would be saying she behaves like any perfectly normal young gay male. Do you see? It is rather complex.
Similarly, we are deeply amused at Judge Garavan's notion of going out (never mind coming home) at a "respectable" hour, and we are already vying with each other to come up with Wildean bon mots about respectability's lack of connection with the hours of the day or night. "There is no such thing as a respectable or disrespectable hour. Hours are a.m. or p.m., that is all" - that kind of thing.
Here in Dublin, you see, we are quite jagged with sophistication. But we may come back another day to the interesting question raised by Judge Garavan, as to where exactly all the nice respectable Galway girls have gone, if they have truly done so. Some of us would like to know, though many of the not-so-respectable young men around the country who are more interested in "dreadful" girls for their own possibly dreadful reasons have no doubt already headed west.