Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Still looking for Christmas as the big day draws near I’ve been looking for Christmas in all the usual places. I tried to find it on the radio, where they’re playing all the old songs – the romantic ones, the zany ones, the poignant ones.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion By dropping Andrew McGinley, the ‘Late Late Show’ has turned its back on its powerful legacy Down through the decades, The Late Late Show has been many things. It has been a late-night debate club where an emerging modern Ireland clashed with church and s tate. It has been pure showbiz, with everyone from U2 to Sinéad O’Connor to Hozier entertaining us. And it has been riotously funny too – from a hyper Tommy Tiernan setting the stage alight to Russell Crowe berating the audience to Oliver Callan hamming it up as Daniel O’Donnell.
Inside the little houses of lockdown: How children turned to art to create a record of life during Covid Like thousands of other children locked down during the pandemic, Paige McCloskey was bored, and more than a little lonely. Stuck at home in Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, with only her parents and older brother for company, the days dragged interminably.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion My next holiday buy is a ‘Kiss Me, I’m Irish’ T-shirt Let’s face it: over the years, we haven’t always been kind about visiting tourists, particularly of the American variety. Not that we would have said it to their faces or anything; instead, we’d gently roll our eyes at the sight of them thronging Temple Bar with their fanny packs and their shamrock T-shirts, searching for an Oirland that those of us who grew up here thought woefully outdated.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion We’re fat and getting fatter but no one wants to talk about it The sun’s been shining, I’ve been at the seaside, and one thing above all stood out as I looked around at the hordes of happy staycationers in bikinis and swimgear – how very, very, very fat we are.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Since Covid kicked off, all the best things happen outside It’s well past 11pm on the seafront in Dun Laoghaire and there’s still light in the sky. I’m sitting outside a restaurant with a group of old friends who’ve spent the past year barely seeing one another. We are lingering over the last of the dinner’s wine, making up for lost time, catching up on every detail of each other’s lives in the long months we’ve been apart.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Mare Sheehan shatters the myth of onscreen women – she’s normal Who would have guessed that it would take Kate Winslet in a flannel shirt eating a cheesesteak to start a revolution? The star’s turn as a beleagured Philadelphia detective in Mare of Easttown, the HBO show that wrapped up this week, has been hailed as her finest yet.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Will we ever understand how Deirdre Morley’s deep love turned itself inside out in the way that it did? IT WAS the normality of it all that was so very hard to shake. The play tent, the iPad, the school uniforms, the cornflakes at bedtime, the treat of an afternoon film on the sofa.
Gallery Premium Lockdown made us more controlling as parents. Is it time to back off a bit? A combination of the better weather and the gradual easing of lockdown restrictions means that, as parents, we are watching our kids finally explore their new-found freedom, something we’ve spent many dark winter months dreaming about.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion We stood screaming at the doorway - no one came to help. Why should women have to live in fear? It was nearly midnight in a busy part of Barcelona. Myself and my friend were in high spirits, on our way home to our holiday apartment after an evening out with a group of friends.
Premium ‘I can’t make it work': How are under-pressure families coping with the demands of homeschooling? We’re almost a month into Homeschool: The Sequel and many families are settling into a routine of weary familiarity. With no end in sight just yet, it’s hard to plan ahead or to know just how long we’ll be doing this for.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion All I want for Christmas is some pizza No way am I cooking a turkey,” declares the friend who’s stuck in London this Christmas.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Dryrobe woman is hero for our times Forget Rosie The Riveter. Forget the Fearless Girl. Forget Mary Wollstonecraft and her naked statue. If you’re looking for the ultimate symbol of female resilience and pragmatism, one that represents all that is best about 2020, look no further than Dryrobe Woman.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Yes, we should ignore the new VP's looks but Kamala Harris knows appearances matter On Saturday night, The Daily Telegraph pushed a Twitter notification for an article headlined “Why Kamala Harris is the modern beauty icon the world needs”.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion It's Lockdown: The Sequel - and no one agrees about anything anymore There was a last haircut for the husband, who doesn't trust me with the scissors. A last walk with a friend, filling up on gossip and laughter before we say our goodbyes for a bit. There was a last playdate for the boys. And a last trip to their favourite place - which, weirdly, is the local garden centre, where they drink hot chocolate with marshmallows amid shelves stacked high already with Christmas decorations.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion I don't care who wins the Six Nations or lifts Sam Maguire, I just want to be able to visit my parents So this is what happens when the Lads are left in charge. You can't visit your parents this side of Christmas, but you can watch Kerry take on Donegal at the weekend. You can't go for a walk with your best friends, but the Ireland-Italy rugby match will go ahead as planned. Three cheers for the Lads!
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Halloween will be twice as scary this year for parents like me In the ongoing horror show that is 2020, this has been a particularly bad week for parents, with the dawning realisation that the thing we most fear has come to pass: Christmas has been cancelled.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Student parties are not reckless - as long as they don't ask granny to come along They say that the camera doesn't lie. But it rarely tells the full story either. The amateur videographer who filmed the by- now infamous footage of crowds of young revellers at Spanish Arch in Galway captured a moment in time: a perfect tableau of youth, freedom and normality that set the stage for the rest of us, locked away in our houses with only Netflix, a bottle of hand sanitiser and a spiralling sense of self-righteousness for company, to spontaneously combust with rage.
'I can't see for the life of me why RTÉ did what they did to Seán O'Rourke' Seven years on from leaving RTÉ, Pat Kenny doesn't need much prompting to take a pop at his former bosses. "Ridiculous," he says, when asked about their handling of Seán O'Rourke's 'Golfgate' involvement.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion After so long at home with our kids, the return to school is bittersweet Can it really be true? Are we really here now? After more than five months of lockdown and homeschooling and banana bread and staycationing, many parents are pinching themselves this week. But yes, it's happening. The schools have finally reopened.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Having cracked the mindfulness mystery, I don't want enlightening lockdown to end The ant has been circling my foot for several minutes now. I have been watching it intently, as it runs over and back across the patio, in ever-decreasing circles. Its purpose is unfathomable, and its progress is slow, but that's OK. I have time to watch it. I don't have anything to do, or anywhere to go. It's just me and the ant.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Back to the future: This lockdown life is a welcome flashback to my '80s childhood No playgrounds, no parties, no parks. No swimming pools, soft-play centres or pizza parlours. No sun holidays, or even a low-key staycation to look forward to.
The Remake by Clive James: A book that proves if you you're still laughing, you'll live In the summer of 1996, my parents decided that it would be a good idea if I spent a month with a French family, in the hope I'd have an outside chance of passing my Leaving Cert paper the following year.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Reasons to be cheerful - celebs given the elbow as we look to life's simple pleasures Yes, we know there's a pandemic going on, and if we think too hard or too much about it we'd never get out of bed in the morning. But equally, it's impossible to escape the fact that the lockdown is bringing with it some entirely unanticipated benefits. And if we were the type of person to keep a gratitude journal (we're definitely not the kind of person to keep a gratitude journal) this is what we'd be grateful for:
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion We can all be covidiots in these strange times - so let's cut everyone a little slack Oh, how we sneered at the weekend day-trippers, thronging the verdant highways and byways of rural Ireland with their SUVs, all venturing out for a leisurely Sunday afternoon stroll, smack bang in the middle of a pandemic.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion We don't know what we've got til it's gone - the little things can be a sweet paradise Joni Mitchell knew all about it. "Don't it always seem to go," she sang, all the way back in 1970, "that you don't know what you've got til it's gone?"
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion If you want to survive this plague look to the elderly - they're made of hardier stuff The white-haired mourners at the removal were of an age when you'd worry that a bad dose of literally anything might kill them, let alone an exceptionally virulent plague drifting in from the east.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Panic might be on the menu, but canned fruit will help see us through the pandemic Thirty-six litres of water. Two dozen tins of beans. Six packs of disinfectant wipes.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion Take religion out of our education system and school traffic jams might vanish too It's 9am on a weekday in the commuter town where I live, and I am trying to cross the road. Easier said than done.
Premium Liz Kearney Opinion We like to laugh at the eco-hypocrisy of stars because deep down we know we're all guilty Is there anything as much fun as playing 'spot the eco-hypocrite'? The more glamorous they are, the more enjoyable it is. And we've had rich pickings this past few months as the Greta-fuelled environmental wave gathered momentum.