Lorraine Keane VIP Style Queen?

Welcome one and all to post Celtic Tiger Ireland 2009. After ten glorious years of style without substance you'd think we'd have learned a thing or two and got our sh!t together? Na-ah. Not on your Nelly folks... We're stilling dressing up intelligent women in Debs dresses and calling it style - kinda funny huh? Not really when you see the number desperate eejits vying for the Peter Mark VIP Style Award... All right Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up...

Lorraine Keane

Ever since innocent days of The Rose of Tralee, Ireland has been awash with parochial beauty contests where loads of hopeful lovely girls line-up in their best gunas to be paraded around and judged. And it still goes on today and not just down-the-country... We're sure from the outside looking in, it must come across as almost prehistoric that modern Irish women still see themselves as creatures to be deemed awardable based on how nice their dresses and shoes are...

Aisling O'Loughlin, Sybil Mulcahy, Lorraine Keane, Karen Koster, Lisa Cannon

Personally we find the whole beauty pageant genre patronising towards woman and basically offensive. But then again, put in the context of The Rose of Tralee, it's what you expect from such a contest annnnnd a couple of lovely girls from the Provinces get a night out to make Mammy and Daddy proud.

Veronica Ryan, Rosanna Davison

Unfortunately 'lovely girl' contests are not merely the confine of the provincial set. O no. They are still apart of the fabric of modern day Ireland where our Nation's Capital is drowning in a sea of daily media driven beauty contests – even the most intelligent and cultured females feel the need to frock-up and be paraded around and outwardly inspected.

Sara Kavanagh, Lynn Kelly, Rachel Wise

Of course, most of the participants in the 'get me in the papers' game will proclaim that it's all a bit of innocent fun and they don't reeeeally take any heed of whether some journo writing for The Herald or The Mirror finds their dress, hair and shoes in-style. Or whether some low grade glossy mag or lifestyle show labels her a 'fashionista' (whatever the hell that means?) or not... If only that were true.

Izabela Chudzicka

The sad part is many of these women use the old adage that they feel its necessary park their brain at the door, and glam-it-up for cameras, as it's a male dominated society and the only way for a woman to get ahead is to use her sexuality as a weapon. Okaaay. We stopped buying that one the very minute Margaret Thatcher came along.

Georgina Byrne, Nicky Byrne

Of course there is intense competition out there, in fact, buckets of it. But its competition driven and fuelled by women who measure theirs and other’s esteem by how many column inches they fill in the daily rags... Imagine the shame of being one of the few lovely girls who attended a big social gathering and DIDN'T get their photo into the papers? Oh the shame. Get my publicist on the phone NOW!

Brian Dowling, Jenny Lee Masterson, Gary Kavanagh

For many a year here at ShowBiz.ie we have been prattling on about the disparity between the numbers of internationally famous Irish males, as opposed to the number of internationally famous Irish females, there are... We came up with a completely unscientific rough ratio of 10:1 i.e. for every ten famous Irish men we have one famous Irish woman... And so it goes, and so it goes...

Martha Christie, Michael Doyle

We know at first that figure sounds kinda controversial and almost unbelievable but when you think long and hard about it we have so many leading men out in Hollywood and so few leading ladies... If you agree with us that there is a fundamental disparity between the sexes then, you have to ask yourself: why?

Brian Ormond, Pippa O'Connor

That's a question that has been bugging us for so long... Why is it that the fairer sex can't break out beyond these shores, in relative terms, when compared to their masculine compatriots? Well, we reckon it all comes back to the dreaded lovely girl syndrome...

Grainne Seoige, Michael O'Doherty, Sile Seoige

Let's face it folks. Our best and brightest females allow themselves to be lined-up and judged by the media based on how pretty they look in a piece of cut fabric and tall pointy shoes. They actually put themselves out there on display like cattle at a market and asked to be judged solely on looks and some contrived bimbo persona backed-up by a sham relationship with an equally shallow red carpet jockey... Well, if it gets me in the papers...

Yvonne Keating

Really, with the advent of the Celtic Tiger and the mess that whole fake and frivolous era landed us in, we really hoped that Ireland would finally grow-up get beyond this moronic and outdated obsession with lovely girls contests. We HAVE to get the message out there to young girls to aspire to conquer the world with their intelligence, talent and creativity as opposed to prancing around in gaudy dresses until some eejit off-de-telly or another sticks a ring on her finger...

Andrea Roche, Michael O'Doherty

We know this country is filled with business smart savvy intelligent women. Some are beautiful looking, some are not. But that shouldn't be an issue and our Nation's media should not be endorsing the modern personification of the Irish female as someone who must be head-to-toe in fake nails, hair, tan and tits to be noticed. It's a demeaning culture we live in right now when every page in our newspapers look like Page 3.

Caroline Morahan

We hope we get to the stage very soon when the bright girls on Xpose ask the gormless actress or model they are interviewing what she intends to do with her third level honours degree rather than where herself and the boyfriend are going to holiday this summer... But maybe we're just clutching at straws. It's always gonna be: "daaaarling you look faaaabulous!"

Aoife Kelly

Lovely girl contests were the life blood of the country in yesteryear and they sure as hell haven't gone anywhere, no matter how hard we try to dress them up and rebrand them...

Maura Derrane

On a completely separate note, ahem, Lorraine Keane won the most stylish lady of 2009 at the Peter Mark VIP Style Awards in The Shelbourne Hotel at the weekend... Lovely girls, sorry, guests included: Rosanna Davison, Veronica Ryan, Aisling O'Loughlin, Sybil Mulcahy, Lorraine Keane, Lisa Cannon, Karen Koster, Victoria Smurfit, Izabela Chudzicka, Sara Kavanagh, Lynn Kelly, Rachel Wise, and many many many many more...

Celia Holman Lee