It’s a shopping centre. Get over it!

You’d swear by the column inches and the amount of broadcast time in the media over the past week that a new continent, populated by strange exotic people, had been discovered in the south Dublin burb of Dundrum. But instead, all the fuss is over a shopping centre.

"But it’s a town centre," they cry. Yeah, well, there’s one called Dublin city centre and it’s got a lot more culture going on than Dundrum. It’s a shopping centre. Nothing more nothing less.

It’s "Europe's largest cathedral of consumption" The Irish Times told us this morning. Erm, Cathedral? Does it have spires? Is it a place of worship or just a jumped up collection of merchants with air conditioned stalls in an indoor market?

For the past three days the IT and other meeja organs have been whipping up the women of Dublin into an hysterical shopping frenzy.

The pictures from RTE of women rushing to be the first in when it opened its doors with their arms held out as if to greet a long lost loved would have been hilarious if they weren’t so frightening.

Had these women never been in a shop before? Was there some new super-duper shop that sold merchandise that could not be found anywhere else in Dublin or the rest of the country for that matter? Was everything being sold at cost?

When the answer to the above is such a glaringly obvious No you have to ask yourself why would these women become so worked up over a shopping centre.

It’s not unfair or sexist to wonder why it was women and not men who got, and in some cases will forever be, so hot under the collar about a mall. The TV pictures clearly showed that men were vastly outnumbered by the women.

More and more Irish women are being suckered by the marketing - a job mainly done by women - of what a modern Irish adult female should be. Whatever the marketers might say, these women are becoming part of what I like to call the Silly Bitch Brigade.

These are the type of gormless girlies who think that Anna Nolan, Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh, and Sheana Keane on the Afternoon show are the essence of cool, the IT Saturday Magazine is must for the "what’s hot and what’s not".

Feminists along with a lot of my female friends have claimed that the Pill dulls women’s senses, making them less creative as well as stifling their emotions.

The hype over the Dundrum Town Centre is doing the same thing.

Get over it girls. It’s a shopping centre not a hundred yards from the old one.