Life

Nuala McCann: Not all toilets are the same. Some are more peequal than others...

When you see what whole villages call a toilet around the world, your heart breaks. Just go twin your toilet. But closer to home, there is a new invention that promises to redress the toilet gender imbalance by offering a kind of female urinal

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Subterranean public toilets used to be a feature of Belfast city centre, including these Victorian facilties in Shaftesbury Square. Picture by Hugh Russell
Subterranean public toilets used to be a feature of Belfast city centre, including these Victorian facilties in Shaftesbury Square. Picture by Hugh Russell Subterranean public toilets used to be a feature of Belfast city centre, including these Victorian facilties in Shaftesbury Square. Picture by Hugh Russell

WOMEN spend 34 times longer queueing for public toilets than men, research suggests.

The popular psychology is that we spend inordinately long in the loo because it is not merely a functional space.

It is where we spill out our secrets, cry, sob, laugh... honestly, don't believe what you see in the movies.

Perhaps those long queues are because research also suggests that there are 10 urinals for every single woman's toilet.

And yes, you can read up about gender bias in architecture and design, prejudice and taboo. There is even an organisation called potty parity.

It's a subject close to my heart because toilets are so basic and the lack of them can have devastating results in terms of public health.

We have a photo in our toilet of a rundown shack in remote Africa where there be monsters beyond a broken wooden door.

When you see what whole villages call a toilet around the world, your heart breaks. Just go twin your toilet.

Closer to home, two women have come up with a new invention that promises to redress the toilet gender imbalance by offering a kind of female urinal to take the heat out of the long queues at summer festivals... You'll have read about those events in the history books.

You have to be a certain vintage to remember the old Victorian toilets in the middle of the road outside Belfast City Hall.

Those were halcyon days before little boxed cubicles with no windows and faulty fans.

Yes, you took your life in your hands dashing into the middle of the road, dodging the 7B to get to the little island and the set of stone steps that took you below ground level.

But trip, trip, trip down the steps and it was amazing what a palace of earthly delights you could spend your penny on.

The brass railing that led down the steps was polished to a yellow gleam, the toilets were under constant supervision from a cleaner who watched you with an eagle eye, the porcelain bowl gleamed white as a new set of false teeth - and the high wooden handle dangling from the chain gave a true reassuring flush when pulled... echoing the Niagara Falls.

But they have gone, gone, gone... alas, and now there is no way I'd try those little portaloo cabins in case the electronics fail and you get locked in.

Having been locked in a toilet in a pub in Marbella on a girls' weekend, with no Spanish and no way out save scaling the door... it is a nightmare compounded by a language barrier that this senora ain't ever going to repeat.

Twenty years ago, Shaftesbury Square introduced these very modern toilets that rose up out of the pavement late at night to put an end to alleyway peeing. It was a whizz of an idea and I always planned a visit but never got round to it.

The women's urinal is another step forward.

Amber Probyn and Hazel McShane spent a summer working at music festivals and saw a gap in the market according to a recent report in The Guardian.

Their answer is the Peequal. It's designed in a kind of wedge meaning that six people can pee at once in a big circle. The women using the facilities are hidden from the waist down.

It's kind of a pedestal - designed like a boat to ensure there's no splash back.

It's all very modern. Already I'm nervous, very nervous.

I'm as nervous as I was back in the early 1980s when the McDonald's in Paris was unisex.

I'm as nervous as I was at the thought of using the old-fashioned toilets in that same city which were essentially two concrete steps for your two feet and a hole in the middle.

Squatting is one thing, but squatting in the pub when you're even one sheet to the wind is altogether a much more shaky experience. It gives splashback a whole new meaning.

There was the fella we knew who had one too many and plunged an unsuspecting foot into the toilet hole.

He emerged from the toilet like Rambo from the swamp... clearing a horrified path in a packed Friday night pub.

I welcome the idea of female urinals - I welcome toilet gender equality.

I'm all for it. It's new, it's innovative and it's about time too.

Still, thanks very much but I'll just hang on until I get home.