This year's Lady of the Lake festival in Fermanagh intends to find Ireland's best wolf whistler – but not everyone is happy. FIONOLA MEREDITHreports
A COMPETITION to find the best wolf-whistler in Ireland will take place this summer in Co Fermanagh – despite protests from some local women who say they find the contest sexist and degrading.
The event is planned as part of the annual Lady of the Lake Festival, held in Irvinestown in July. Unrepentant organiser Joe Mahon, a local hotelier who came up with the idea after chatting to friends in his bar, insists that it’s all good clean fun: “We’ve had ghosts, leprechauns and turkeys before, but this time we’ll have loads of animals on the street like horses, donkeys, geese and ducks and loads of women as well.
“Then we’ll have men all lined up and down the street to wolf whistle at the women as they parade past. There’ll be a judge and he’ll pick the best wolf whistler in Ireland”.
There’s more than a touch of Craggy Island eccentricity about the planned occasion. In fact, the long-running festival has a history of wilfully bizarre events: there’s the annual charity Truck Convoy, where hundreds of articulated lorries roar around the Fermanagh lakelands blasting on their horns. In 2005, it was claimed that Elvis Presley would make “the most sensational comeback ever” in the small Fermanagh town. (Although the then organiser Jimmy Dundas admitted that “people might dismiss the Elvis comeback as ‘just another silly stunt’, especially after the live leprechaun business two years ago.”)
And then there’s the fancy dress competition, won for the last 30 years by local man Francy Ward. His winning strategy? He always dresses as a woman. Ward triumphed last year with a unique interpretation of Tina Turner – complete with unkempt wig, gold lame top and black PVC mini-skirt.
Of course, while some women find the odd wolf whistle flattering and inoffensive, others consider it boorish and disrespectful.
Last year, an Israeli tourist in New Zealand got so fed up with the persistent sexual pestering that she’d received while on holiday there that she decided to take matters into her own hands. When a group of road workers wolf whistled her as she used an ATM machine, she calmly stripped off all her clothes and stood naked as a protest against their tactics – one that ended in the woman being carted off to the local police station.
As far as former Ulster Unionist councillor Jean McVitty is concerned, the Fermanagh wolf-whistling parade is a step too far: “I find it extremely degrading to women and not becoming of the female gender. It’s an activity that one would not expect to find in 2009, it’s something one would find in the dark ages . . . I know it’s only a bit of craic and to publicise the Lady of the Lake festival but many women find it demoralising.”
But Joe Mahon seems genuinely perplexed that anyone might have a problem with it. “I think women love being whistled at because it’s a compliment to them,” he says. “Everyone does it, builders have done it for years and I whistle at my wife all the time and she loves it.”
In fact, he says, a well-timed wolf-whistle was how he met Marie, his wife of 22 years: “I saw this good-looking woman walking down the main street in Irvinestown but I was too shy to talk to her, so I gave her a whistle.” The rest, as they say, is history. “We have about 40 girls signed up already, old and young,” says Mahon.
“And Judith Wilson, the former Miss Northern Ireland, who is from Ballinamallard in Co Fermanagh, rang me up and put her name down. The local paper ran a poll about the event and it showed that the women all loved it, the only people giving out about it were a couple of men. We want all ages and sizes of women – big, wee, whatever, the more the better. It’s important that everyone sees the sporting side of the whole thing and treats it like a competition.”
Mahon himself is certainly taking the contest seriously, practising his whistle on his dog, Shep, and running classes in his hotel for prospective male contestants.
WHILE MAHON IS evidently a long-standing whistler, able to produce a piercing yip, others have found that they need a little help in co-ordinating lips, breath and tongue to find the “sweet spot”.
Mahon also reveals that as well as the familiar, appreciative variety of wolf-whistle, there’s the kind meted out to women who don’t meet with a man’s approval – a mocking, descending cadence that’s unmistakeably derisory. How would he like to be on the receiving end of that? “Ah well, you have to take the rough with the smooth,” he says with a shrug.
However, a gender equality – of sorts – may yet prevail at Ireland’s first wolf-whistling competition. Joe Mahon says, “we’re hoping lots of women will volunteer to walk past the men. But if they want, the women can enter to whistle themselves and we’ll get the men to walk past them so they can get their own back.”
The Lady of the Lake festival runs from July 14 to July 20 2009