Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Harsh reality behind the TV scenes

Five years is an eternity in the world of reality television. For the winning contestant of a hugely successful show, it’s ample time for a career as an overnight celebrity to take off, blaze and then dramatically crash and burn. It’s enough time for a format to launch, become a national talking point and then grow stale.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Narcissist Paul Moody is the face of an appalling crime few understand

Until a year ago, disgraced g arda Paul Moody, who was jailed last week for waging a campaign of psychological torture and physical abuse on a former partner, presented to the outside world as a model citizen.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Every day I pray for the relief the rain will bring from the punishing sun as the thermometer climbs above 40C

This May was the hottest ever recorded in France.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Surrogacy can be born out of financial need as well as love

Celebratory headlines greeted the news last week that the Irish parents of children born via surrogacy may soon see an end to the legal limbo that has, for years, destabilised a significant number of families in the Republic.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Policies must dig even deeper to end scourge of gender-based violence

Justice Minister Helen McEntee wants to usher in a new era in gender relations in Ireland. To do so, she has announced an ambitious new national strategy to tackle domestic, sexual and gender-based violence.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Lost lives in Tipperary show scale of loneliness epidemic

On the face of it, it reads like a cautionary tale of loneliness in the time of Covid. The bodies of an elderly English couple, long-time permanent residents in a small village in rural Ireland, are found in their home. They have been dead, the police suspect, for some time, possibly as long as 18 months. In all that time, nobody noticed their absence.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Refugees offered an unsafe haven in hotel

In a hotel on the outskirts of Dublin, a ballroom has been converted into a makeshift dormitory. Rows of single mattresses are tucked against walls. For those without even mattresses, duvets have been neatly doubled over and covered with blankets to make sleeping on the floor more tolerable.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Farewell to the era of the girlbosses

For over a decade, Sheryl Sandberg has been the human face of Facebook. Since she moved from Google to become chief operating officer of the company in 2008, she’s been credited with making the company profitable by developing its targeted ads business model.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion How Lisa Smith was shaped by toxic masculinity

Last week an Irish court decided beyond a reasonable doubt that Lisa Smith, a former soldier from Dundalk, acted with clear-eyed intent when she ran away to join a death cult in Syria in 2015. She has been convicted of membership of a terrorist organisation, but must wait until the July sentencing date to learn how she will be required to repay her debt to society.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Dublin Airport — gateway to the world, and public showcase for violence

It’s been barely three weeks since Justice Minister Helen McEntee smilingly cut the ribbon on a new Garda station at Dublin Airport, to be manned by 48 officers.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Secular Ireland still needs and yearns for community of ritual

First holy communion season is in full swing. All across the country, caterers are being booked, small dresses lovingly steamed, small shoes carefully polished.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Outlawing cannabis is ludicrous, but the risks it poses to mental health can’t be ignored

The western world appears to be moving gradually but inexorably towards decriminalising or even legalising cannabis. In 2018 Canada passed the Cannabis Act, making it the first G20 country to legalise the drug.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Sexism and abuse part and parcel of political life

Anyone following the sexism crisis in Westminster last week could be forgiven for thinking that the tone of British politics has descended into the sort of ribald farce churned out by Viz magazine.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion The hunger for a baby makes people ripe for exploitation

For those who are desperate to conceive, for whom having a family represents the very meaning of being, it is logical they will sacrifice everything they can afford, and even things they cannot, to fulfil what often feels like the most primal human desire. Because nothing else, at least nothing material, matters as much.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion We can conquer prejudice and hate

Is bigotry intrinsic? In Ireland, much has been done in recent years to reform our laws and reconstruct social norms to reflect a new set of values aspired to by the majority — values of tolerance, pluralism and inclusivity. But reminders of the stubborn persistence of prejudice and hate in our society are never far away.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion It’s a dangerous time for ‘new-age bimbo’ to forget where she came from

TikTok is where Gen Z go to invent themselves. So it’s no surprise that the social media site has given birth to a cultural artefact which couldn’t be more rooted in the early 2020s — the rise of the ‘new-age bimbo’.

Premium

Feeling burnt out? How to get off the hamster wheel of toxic productivity

Do you feel you spend your daylight hours pin-balling from task to task? Wake up at 3am in a cold sweat over a to-do list that seems to grow faster than you can tick items off? Is the pressure to always be hustling pushing you to burnout? Perhaps you have fallen victim to the contemporary cult of toxic productivity.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Tackling the permanent silence that is suicide

A hard-hitting advertising campaign has been launched in the UK by the charity Men’s Minds Matter , in a bid to tackle male suicide. It aims to take us beyond the statistics, offering a frank encounter with the ruptured relationships suicide leaves in it s wake.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Kyiv’s surrogate babies born under bombs are left in an ethical limbo

War is a strange lens through which to examine social mores. It is both revealing and distorting — and commercial surrogacy in Ukraine is a case in point.

Julia Molony Opinion ‘How Instagram helped me to become a better, calmer parent’

Conventional wisdom says that smartphones, and especially social media, are detrimental to good relations between parents and their children. There’s more than a touch of moral panic around at the moment about a generation of parents caricatured as perma-scrolling and perennially distracted; too busy posting their kids’ pictures on Instagram to pay them any proper attention.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Now isn’t the time for the rich, fabulous have-it-alls to lecture the rest of us

If you are a woman wondering how to escape the financial doldrums, perhaps languishing in rental accommodation, unable to get on to the property ladder, perhaps feeling trapped by student debt or wondering how to support your children on zero hours contracts in the face of precipitously rising costs of living, social media influencer and billionaire Kim Kardashian has some advice for you.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Bastions of single-sex education feel the winds of change

Where Rathdown has gone, the rest will likely follow. The elite secondary school in Glenageary, South County Dublin — until recently a proud girls-only establishment — has done a sharp about-turn. As of September, it will admit boys.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Without hope, decency or dignity, our prisons are of no value to us

As war broke out in Europe and Russian shells rained down on the innocent civilians of Kyiv, concerns about the welfare of convicted criminals in Irish prisons was not, understandably, uppermost in people’s minds. Which explains why a worrying story published last week concerning the outgoing Prisons Inspector Patricia Gilheaney passed under the radar, barely registering so much as a blip.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Market-led childcare model fails everyone

Irish parents are “the most exploited in Europe ”, decried the newspaper editorial. Beleaguered families were, it went on, “fuelling the economy by surviving on punishing two-career schedules while also rearing young children without support from anybody.”

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Helen, Jacinda and Sanna show what real leadership involves

Just under a year ago, Justice Minister Helen McEntee set a historical precedent when she became the first serving cabinet minister to have a baby while in office, and crucially, to take six months’ maternity leave as is her legal right.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Casting Carrie as public enemy No 1 an all too familiar ploy for politicians

Calamity in the halls of British government. Boris Johnson’s advisers are abandoning him as fast as rats from the proverbial sinking ship. Meanwhile, his personal household is under investigation, with police looking into 12 allegedly illegal social gatherings said to have taken place during lockdown at the prime minister’s flat.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion In their despair they cried out for help, but all they got was a pill

Last week, as the personal stories behind the south Kerry Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) scandal started to emerge, a disturbing picture began to come into focus.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion The only real hope of conquering this savagery is humanity

Last week, while out for a perfectly ordinary jog on a perfectly ordinary Wednesday afternoon, 23-year-old teacher Ashling Murphy ran headlong into every woman’s worst nightmare.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Incels: How the pandemic has led to a boom in groups of angry, sexually-frustrated men who want to hurt women

What is the link between the pandemic and violent misogyny online? There appears to be one. At least according to the results of a study by The London Times and the UK Centre For Countering Digital Hate released last week, which finds that the number of visitors to incel websites — online chat rooms that attract angry, sexually rejected young men and foment extreme misogyny — have exploded six-fold in nine months.

Premium

Julia Molony Opinion Pursuit of Pinterest perfection at Christmas is just widening the gender gap

In the pre-internet age, Christmas traditions in Northern Europe were a clearly defined set of collective practices — most of them were invented either by the church or the Germans and remained unchanged for generations.