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Brendan O'Connor

Simon Harris. Photo: Julien Behal

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Brendan O'Connor Opinion Minister for Making Life Bearable

It's getting cranky out there again. People who never gave a thought to a horse before are livid about a man sitting on a dead horse. And we're blaming the young people for everything else. We're blaming them for spreading Covid, for having a good time, and for the fact that they are young and we're not any- more and our lives are passing us by with this damn thing. We're wondering, too, what the hell they're doing at college when college is online.
'I know that I won’t be able to rest until I find out if a Twix Stick is just a regular finger of Twix, or whether it is a slightly slimmer Twix'. Stock image.

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Brendan O’Connor: I discovered they have a fully chocolate-coated Hobnob. I was excited, but I was on my own at the time, so I had no one to share the good news with. Yes, these are the things I’m clinging on to in an effort to punctuate my day...

I take my pleasures where I can now. I think we would all agree that one of our many problems these days is that there is nothing to look forward to anymore. The things that punctuated our lives before — a holiday, a night out, a little road trip, are gone. And it turns out that much of what made our dull lives seem interesting was having something to look forward to.
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Brendan O'Connor Opinion First birthday party poopers

It was the ultimate irony; the moment when bad communications jumped the shark. Micheál Martin is in a Fianna Fáil parliamentary party meeting - events which now become a kind of public town hall, a weekly airing of the grievances to which the whole country is invited. Across town, somewhere else in cyberspace, a Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting is hearing major discontent about the Government's handling of the pandemic, with bad communication being a particular bugbear.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin. Photo: Francisco Seco//File Photo

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Brendan O'Connor Opinion Loose-lipped Living with Covid

You have to have your skates on these days if you want to get the latest on the pandemic. It was bad enough when you just had to keep up with the national radio stations, where Roderic O'Gorman might pop up to casually tell Philip Boucher-Hayes about the reopening of schools - only the most important news ever to parents - or where Stephen Donnelly might posit on Newstalk that actually the opening of the economy has not been totally taken off the table.
Brendan O'Connor

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School was all my daughter had and the latest is she's not disabled enough to go back... she doesn't need sympathy but to be given a chance

We weren't even surprised. That's the depressing thing. A few weeks ago, our children with special needs, the ones who were hanging on in there in mainstream classes, were going back to school. A few weeks later, with numbers substantially lower and much clearer advice that it is safe, our children, kids with things like Down syndrome and autism and other atypicalities who are in mainstream classes, have somehow fallen off the list for the return to school of kids with special needs.

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Brendan O'Connor: When I say ‘party’, you may get the impression there is a social element to the whole thing. In reality, it’s just me, and I’m actually running. So there’s no refreshment

Every week I do something new that makes me think, "This is absolutely the most middle-aged thing I've done." Take the Lockdown Classic Album Listening Parties. It all started with the 1980 David Bowie album Scary Monsters and Super Creeps. At some stage in one of the lockdowns, my brother sent me some Instagram post about it being 40 years old, by way of reminding the two of us how old we are and how long ago things happened. And I started listening to it, and thought it would be nice to take the time to listen to it right through, sequentially, and reflect on it. And so the Classic Album Listening Parties were somehow born.
Brendan O'Connor

I am too old to get really moved by most pop music at this stage but there is something about this that nearly makes me weep. It feels like someone saying, ‘there, there, cry if you want, here’s a tissue and some beautiful music as a balm’

You could worry that we should be suspicious of The Avalanches' new album. It took them 16 years to make their second album, so four years for their third album seems like indecent haste. Some might be hesitant, worrying that it should have taken longer. But actually it's perfectly effective as a vaccine against everything right now.

Brendan O'Connor

It was all very well sipping Prosecco out of a flask cup under a tree during lockdowns, but it's a pale imitation of the real thing

I have heard tales of people who got a bit, shall we say, "overstimulated" on nights out recently. I can see why that might have happened. It's pretty amazing to be out. It makes you giddy, doesn't it? And then of course there is the time limit. I broke into a light jog the other night because I was going to be three minutes late for a dinner slot. I wanted to savour every sweet minute of my allotted time.

Brendan O'Connor

Going out requires a real commitment. If you are going somewhere right now, that is where you are going and you are going nowhere else, unless you want two dinners. So the stakes are high, you need to be really sure of the venue

It's like that old line about how did you go bust - gradually and then suddenly. I think I could be into the suddenly phase of going middle-aged. Obviously it's not helped by the pandemic. I had actually managed to turn 50 reasonably successfully in January. I actually thought I'd got away with it, dodged the bullet somehow.

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