There is such a thing as too much detail - unless you are Gerry Adams' mum.

And in the same week, the Broacasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) objected to Tr�caire's advertisements for its Lenten campaign on gender inequality on the grounds that the campaign is political. Thank God we still have the charity lunch, eh?

Charity fundraising has become a bit of a dirty business, it seems to me. Any set of lunatics can order a few dozen prawn starters and a couple of crates of white wine and congratulate themselves on helping the underprivileged as they run a raffle for gleaming cars and free trips abroad. . . for charidee. But encouraging concerned members of the public to lobby governments on gender inequality is pushing things a bit too far, obviously.

And yet, and yet. The Tr�caire advertisement of sweet little babies who are condemned to a life of poverty, violence and deprivation because of their sex is worrying. Not because it is political - let's take politics away from the politicians before they ruin it entirely - but because of how it presents the female condition, whatever that may be.

Normally when people say that they admire an organisation it is a hypocritical genuflection to its lawyers. But I really do admire Tr�caire, which is a thoughtful and radical organisation.

Tr�caire is quite right to address the issue of gender inequality head on. The poverty and the violence - not to mention the genital mutilation and the infanticide - falls most heavily on the female children of what we used to call the third world.

It's not the idea behind the advertisement that disturbs me, or its socalled political nature, but its execution.

Is it really helpful to women to draw a parallel between being female and having a dreadful disease such as malaria or Aids? Does that really help women, to declaim our gender as such a dreadful handicap?

Surely it turns being female into a ticking time bomb which is going to explode in the beautiful faces of all the babies in the advertisement. It is disheartening and negative. And while no one could object to a few couch potatoes in the privileged west being disheartened if it is going to make a big difference to a shocking injustice in a struggling society, I wonder if it will.

I wonder how African women, for example, would view that advertisement. Would they be pleased with the portrait that it paints of their lives, and of their daughters' lives. Surely the women of any developing nation are its hope and its strength, not simply helpless victims who have been infected with the fatal virus of femaleness.

It's the women of the poor countries who do most of the work and, if I understand this correctly, are the most open to starting their own businesses, helping their communities with projects like providing clean water, vaccination programmes, literacy initiatives and so on and tirelessly on. Shouldn't all this work and struggle be recognised instead of mourned over at the cradle?

I also worry about children - often the most motivated viewers when it comes to television coverage of world issues - looking at this advertisement. What does it tell them about being female?

That it's pretty bad but even worse if you are not a little white girl? These days not every little girl in Ireland is white.

In my innocence I thought that the BCI had objected to the Tr�caire advertisement because someone had raised these questions with them. It never occurred to me that the ad would be withdrawn from commercial television stations and the radio on the grounds that it was political.

I thought some African woman had written in and said: "We're quite worried about you lot as well, you know." Now that would be equality. We're in for a long wait.