They've laid down the law about Portmarnock Golf Club. The law has supported the concept of Portmarnock as a private, men-only club. All the organisations devoted to gender equality are fit to be tied.

But does it really matter? Is it a major setback for the onward march of equality?

Bluntly, it's an irritant, rather than a worrying precedent. Because women haven't achieved equality in so many other areas, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to get hugely incensed about one posh private golf club. Especially when the women golfers who pay their (reduced) fees to Portmarnock to be allowed to play at particular (limited) times won't strip themselves of their pastel skorts and their clicky cleats and walk out. Half a loaf, in golfing terms, seems to be better than no baguette at all.

The majority of non-golfing women, right now, have too much on their plate -- or perhaps too LITTLE on their plate to worry about a bunch of golfing troglodytes threatened by the full involvement of female players.

The men who run Portmarnock are wealthy, influential men who wouldn't like to be doorstepped by a journalist accompanied by a camera, asking about their totally legal exclusion. Nor would they like to see their pictures in this or any other paper.

Dynamic

They would point to other clubs, like the gyms under the "Curves" brand, which were founded for women and which exclude men.

And they would be right. Some women would prefer to have a place to go to, for fitness and leisure, that has a particular -- and very female -- dynamic.

In the past, the international golfing tours have taken action against clubs which excluded people of a particular race, religion or gender.

They announced that such venues would not be selected as hosts of major tournaments, even if the exclusion they practiced was legal in their particular state or jurisdiction. It was an effective form of international naming and shaming.

The clubs caved in.

That's unlikely to happen, in the case of Portmarnock.

And even if it did, one school of thought holds that many members of that club would be pleased, rather than vexed, if it did, since the allocation to a club of a big international competition plays hell with their access to their own course.

The temptation, for feminists, is to link this decision to historic humiliations of women. They shouldn't. It's not going to lead to a new or reinforced pattern of exclusion of women.

Of much more significance were recent comments by prominent men suggesting that women's access to medical education should be restricted, on the basis that these silly women, as soon as they qualified as doctors (often at the top of their class) would get hitched and start having babies and be less committed to medicine than their male classmates.

Now, THAT'S serious. That matters. That's a real and present threat to the changing patterns of Irish life which allow women into areas from which they were once excluded.

That's why this judgment is an irritant, rather than a serious precedent. It's the law. Clearly, the law needs to be changed.

Emasculation

But that change is not as urgent as the threat to equality posed by the emasculation and merging of equality agencies designed to fight career-threatening exclusions of women.

What was that great phrase? "The last sting of a dying wasp."

That's how this decision should be viewed. Women's progress onward and upward does not centre on full membership of a golf club.

- Terry Prone