Journalists

Mary Kenny: Parallel lives? The fascinating similarity between the literary beginnings of France's Colette and our Edna O'Brien 

Do men always have the advantage over women? Are men always the winners and women the victims? That tends to be the narrative that we favour today - sometimes for plausible reasons - but it isn't always the case.

Mary Kenny: 'If you want to help reduce climate change, do not take a daily shower' 

We are all environmentalists now, aren't we? We are all converts to the idea that we must save the planet by living sustainably. Young people, in particular, are embracing a "greener" lifestyle. Climate change, we are told, is the greatest threat to our universal civilisation.

Mary Kenny: 'We have only to look at our own past to grasp the Brexit mindset' 

I have a vote in Kent, but I didn't vote for Brexit, nor would I - it certainly isn't in Ireland's interest. But I am surrounded by those who did, here in strong Brexit country.

Mary Kenny: 'At last I've found a diet that really works for me' 

A new diet in January is predictable: that's why I started my latest diet at the end of last October. By January, I hoped, I'd be sufficiently encouraged by positive results.

Mary Kenny: 'Our future will be ever more organised - and controlled - by artificial intelligence. Should we fear rule by robots?' 

Who knows what a new year will bring? Who knows what the future will bring? No one can foretell because nothing turns out quite as predicted.

They're gaining new popularity, but are boarding schools a prison or a paradise? 

In an age where equality is so widely extolled, private education is thriving and most private schools in the Dublin area are over-subscribed. With the return of economic prosperity (apparently), parents don't baulk at paying €6,000 or €7,000 annually for their cherished offspring to attend Alexandra or Gonzaga College.

Mary Kenny's Brexit cookbook: 'Have you tried only eating food that doesn't have to be transported or imported?' 

Who'd have thunk that the dreaded Brexit might turn out to be a culinary inspiration? Someone, somewhere in Britain will soon produce a Brexit cookbook.

Mary Kenny: 'The Oireachtas proposes revising sex education. But can the full truth about sexuality ever be taught?' 

I am totally in favour of sex education. Generations - including mine - were sent out into the world unprepared for what it might put their way. Girls who grew up in institutions were particularly vulnerable: knowing nothing about sex, they were easily seduced with the promise of love, and were soon on the road either to a lonely and impoverished single motherhood, or a depressing cycle of...

Mary Kenny: 'Our values are guided by geography - so let's put common sense on the Brexit map' 

It is welcome news that there are plans to restore history as a core subject in primary schools. It can't be said often enough: unless we understand the past, we cannot proceed to the future.

Mary Kenny: 'Procrastination is condemned as a character failing - but there are times when it can help creativity and decision-making' 

Procrastination, 'tis said, is "the thief of time". "Never put off 'til tomorrow what you can do today," we are prudently advised. Duties are "put on the long finger". Decisions are "kicked into the long grass", while a procrastinating process of "kicking the can down the road" takes place.

Mary Kenny: 'I had a bit of a tidy-up of my bedroom recently, and realised that I owned (at least) 47 lipsticks' 

I had a bit of a tidy-up of my bedroom recently, and realised that I owned (at least) 47 lipsticks: in addition to all the other unguents, potions, skin creams, moisturisers and assorted cosmetics.

Mary Kenny: 'My advice to all those Brits who now want to be Irish? Be careful what you wish for' 

It's St Stephen's Day and I'm happy to offer tutorials to all those Brits I know who have successfully received their Irish passports over the past year: It's not Boxing Day, it's Stephen's Day.

Mary Kenny: Magi magic 

In our era of multiculturalism, perhaps the image of The Adoration of the Magi is quite apt: the "three wise men" who bring gifts to the infant Jesus are depicted as representing three different ethnicities.

Does misogyny lie behind the abuse of Theresa May? 

There is one aspect of Theresa May's character that invites admiration - her sheer grit.

Friend or foe? 

There's a theory going around that social media has made people now more intolerant of others, their opinions and values. Facebook users sometimes 'unfriend' each other, and people on Twitter quite commonly 'block' other contributors if they dislike their views or consider them hostile.

Mary Kenny: 'Brexit is too complex to be explained by Brit-bashing' 

Yes, the United Kingdom is in a bit of a pickle over the ‘deal or no deal’ Brexit. But not to worry. The noted Irish intellectual and commentator is on hand to dispense his analysis of the whole problem: the root cause of Brexit, Fintan O’Toole avers, is the fatal British nostalgia for empire.

Mary Kenny: More men from Rathnew volunteered for WWI than from anywhere else 

The conclusion of the First World War in November 1918 will be a major European commemoration this month. In Woodenbridge, Co Wicklow, a somewhat smaller ceremony will take place in the middle of the month in the beautiful local World War I memorial there - a landscaped park with simple headstones which list the Wicklow men who served and died in that terrible war. They are...

Mary Kenny: 'The hot air of 'fascism' fans flames - but it's nowhere near' 

Fascism? It's all the rage. Or, at least, throwing around accusations about encroaching fascism in every society is now the fashion.

Mary Kenny: The granny bash... Should ageism be considered a hate crime? 

As Ireland prepared to vote on whether to remove the offence of blasphemy from the Constitution, in Britain the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, proposed to extend the remit against "hate crimes" and "hate speech" in law. You could argue that the prohibition against offensive speech is just a modern, liberal version of blasphemy. It's certainly another form of "thou shalt not".

Mary Kenny: Periodic tales 

In the run-up to the recent Budget, the Fianna Fáil Senator Lorraine Clifford Lee said that the State should provide sanitary products for women experiencing "period poverty".

Mary Kenny: Lady C's reader 

At the end of this month, Sotheby's, the auctioneers, will place under the hammer an original paperback copy of DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. This is the sexually explicit novel which was the subject of the very famous court case in 1960, when it was cleared of charges of being likely to deprave and corrupt. It was subsequently published for the multitudes in paperback.

Mary Kenny: Doomed by DNA? 

Notice how carefully and conscientiously most young parents raise their children these days. The attention they pay to the child's needs! The ferrying around between swimming lessons and Spanish lessons and music lessons and sports coaching: the urgent struggles to get the kids into the best schools and the outraged resentment if a school with a fine reputation is over-subscribed.

Mary Kenny: Street lessons 

If it was up to me to nominate an alternative candidate for the Presidency of Ireland, I'd suggest Alice Leahy, the woman who has done so much, over the past 40 years, to care for the homeless and the people she calls "outsiders" - often in every sense of the word - in the streets of Dublin.

Mary Kenny: Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy... 

Saoirse Ronan - probably the most famous Irish thespian in the world - is due to make an exciting new movie. On an exciting old theme. Saoirse is to take the role of Jo, in a new version of Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig: Louisa May Alcott's immortal story - never out of print since it was first published 150 years ago - for a feminist age.

Mary Kenny: Dearest stepmum! 

During the August Papal visit, Leo Varakar made a landmark speech in which he told Pope Francis that Ireland had greatly changed in recent decades and that "families come in many forms".

Mary Kenny: Drink up, hook up… 

We live in a society full of contradictions, especially when it comes to sexuality. Casual sex and ubiquitous pornography are regarded as normal freedoms: simultaneously, the manners and decorum of Jane Austen's drawing room are expected, particularly from men.

Mary Kenny: Granny knows best 

The "granny grant" suggestion, made by Minister Shane Ross in July, didn't meet with much enthusiasm. He was lambasted for his proposal to give a grant of €1,000 a year to grandparents who cared for their grandchildren on a regular basis. He reckoned this would cost about €70 million a year to the exchequer, but economists said his sums were ludicrously underestimated: the cost could run into untold billions of euro, since all four grandparents might be entitled to claim.

Mary Kenny: The female Old Master 

It is often claimed today that the Catholic church in general - and the Vatican in particular - has treated women unequally: yet there was an astonishing number of women artists flourishing in Renaissance Italy, often under Papal encouragement. Popes Clement VIII, Gregory XIII and Paul V all commissioned and encouraged female artists to produce paintings, embroidery (then called "needle painting") and altar-pieces.

Mary Kenny: Thoroughly modern Mainie 

Visitors to Dublin viewing its famed Georgian architecture may spot a plaque at 36 Fitzwilliam Square proclaiming that 'Mainie Jellett - 1897-1944 - Painter - lived and worked here'. Dublin Tourism's tribute could have added that Mainie (born Mary Harriett) Jellett virtually introduced modern art to Ireland, with her creative Cubist style.

Mary Kenny: New impressions of femininity 

'Madonna and Child' paintings have been a classic artistic theme for centuries, but there is a critique that these images are over-idealised male constructs of submissive maternity: of women accepting the role of motherhood passively rather than embracing it actively, according to feminist theory.

Frida: artist of the selfie 

Today, Frida Kahlo is probably the most famous female artist in the world. Although she died in 1954, aged 47, she is truly contemporary: she is the artist of the selfie, since most of her paintings are self-portraits. Even in her own lifetime, she had revolutionised the genre of the self-portrait, bringing not only a dazzling female sensibility and intensity to it, but a narrative of family, nativist culture, costume, obsession with fertility, Surrealism, revolution and religious iconography.

Mary Kenny: Cleaning house 

Perhaps unwisely, I have agreed to host a French teenager on a cultural exchange arrangement during the month of August. This has occasioned me to examine the state of my household and my general domestic skills, which are not exemplary.

Mary Kenny: The prediction game 

Now here's an interesting career choice for any young graduate searching for something unusual: 'superforecaster'.

Mary Kenny: Advice from the Emperor 

On France's national holiday, what better way to mark it than to call to mind the founder of modern France, Napoleon Bonaparte - the historic figure on whom President Macron specifically models himself.

Mary Kenny: Travelling light? 

At the height of her tennis career, Martina Navratilova said the only thing she hated about travelling for tournaments was PACKING. She dreaded it and would pay someone else any money to pack for her. Well, if we travel, we have to pack, and the only way to organise it properly is to make a list for our travelling requirements, as I do here…

Mary Kenny: The Collins doctrine 

'Age is just a number," Dame Joan Collins said on her 85th birthday recently. "It's totally irrelevant unless you're a bottle of wine. You are what you think you are. I look and feel several decades younger."

Mary Kenny: It's a rich woman's world 

There's a bit of a trend at the moment of older people giving advice to their younger selves - or, older women giving advice to younger women. Although there's also some research which claims that advice is often irrelevant and outdated and seldom heeded anyway.

Mary Kenny: The cost of throwaway culture 

So here's the new villain in our lives: plastic. Every time we pick up a takeaway coffee in its plastic container - and, even worse, with a plastic lid - we are contributing to the agonising death of marine life in the oceans. Whenever you purchase a bottle of water in its plastic container, you are adding your own little bit to the 8.3 billion tonnes of waste plastic floating around the globe, most of it accumulating from the past 15 years.

Mary Kenny: Adopting attitudes 

When I was about 11 I heard my aunt say that a couple we knew had adopted their daughter. "And aren't they brave!" she exclaimed. "Because you wouldn't know where an adopted child came from."

Mary Kenny: Penning pregnancy 

It's sometimes suggested that artists and novelists are better at sensing the zeitgeist - that spirit of the age - than more prosaic sources, such as economists and political analysts. This perhaps was illuminated by Dublin's choice, this year, for its UNESCO "one city, one book" focus. The book selected was Sinéad Gleeson's anthology of short stories by women, entitled The Long Gaze Back.

Mary Kenny: You'll have mail! 

I love post offices. I love standing in a queue in a local post office. I love the neighbourliness of the people, and I love exchanging chat with the post office staff, about the weather, the state of the neighbourhood, and, if it's Linda, whether we're succeeding in our current diet and fighting the flab. (There was a power cut when I was in a post office queue last week, and everyone started joking about the Russians starting on cyberwarfare.)

Mary Kenny: Family values? Yes and no 

Many good people in Ireland are volunteering to serve as stewards for the Pope's visit in August for the World Meeting of Families. And I feel sure that Francis will be met with the customary Céad Míle Fáilte traditionally accorded to visitors to this country, and all will go well.

Mary Kenny: If Meghan Markle wants to promote feminism, why is she quitting her job? 

I always thought that one of the regrettable aspects of Grace of Monaco's life was that she quit her profession after marriage. Admittedly, women did, usually, resign their jobs on marrying (or were obliged to do so) in those days, but it didn't always apply to women in the arts, and certainly not in the performing arts - some famous actresses even styled themselves "Mrs" for added distinction.

Mary Kenny: Play on! An 85-year-old family piano has a story of its own to tell 

Some decades ago - back in the 1930s - my mother acquired an upright piano which pleased her very much. It had, she told me, belonged to the Archbishop of Dublin Dr John Charles McQuaid when he was Dean of Blackrock College, and whether she purchased it from him directly or through another owner wasn't quite clear. (Younger people: if you want to know something about a past episode...

Mary Kenny: Hail glorious St Patrick! 

Oh, the neighbouring nations have tried. They've tried very hard. Awed by the success of St Patrick's Day, not only in Ireland, but worldwide, there have been concerted efforts to establish St David's, St Andrew's and St George's as national saints' days in Wales, Scotland and England.

Mary Kenny: Faith accompli? 

An increasing number of parents want to remove their children from religious education classes at school - according to Education Minister Richard Bruton - and that's entirely their right. But I now wish I'd had more RE rather than less.

Mary Kenny: For better or for worse… 

Planning to marry? My advice from over 40 years' experience.

Does Helena have it all? 

Feminist icons are often unmarried or childless or both - Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem - but now there is an influential feminist role-model who is a married mother of nine children.

Mary Kenny: An ill wind… How falling sick can expand our horizons 

We talk a lot these days about having "agency" - our capacity to exert our own will - and "bodily autonomy" - our rights of ownership over our own body. But if there's one thing that totally wipes out notions of "agency" and "bodily autonomy", it's illness.

Mary Kenny: Sons and lovers 

Philip Larkin's most famous poem is a catchy but sour disquisition on the malign influence of parents ("They f*** you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do"). It now emerges that his reflections were all too autobiographical: he seems to have inherited his gloomy and misanthropic view of family life from his own mother, Eva.

Mary Kenny: I found sanity at the cinema 

The Irish, I'm proud to say, are rated as the best cinema-goers in Europe (along with the French) by the International Union of Cinemas and last year, cinema attendances increased again in this country.

Mary Kenny: Because she's worth it? 

When I was a young woman, I was an executive on a London evening newspaper, and when a political storm broke over a trade union dispute, I suggested we should commission Barbara Castle to write a comment piece.

Mary Kenny: Remembering MP Markievicz 

Constance Markievicz would certainly be astonished to have been told that 100 years after she was the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons, a British Tory prime minister - also a woman - would be declaring her intention of honouring the occasion.

Curfuggled by Slurvian? 

There are 24 official languages in the European Union, but only three working tongues: French, English and German. It had been suggested that after Britain quits the EU, English might lose its official status. (Ireland and Malta, though English-speaking, don't claim English as their official language.)

Happy birthday, you legends! 

Those due to celebrate their 50th birthday in 2018 may enjoy contemplating the fascinating year in which they were born: the legendary 1968. This is 'the year that rocked history', in the words of one of its many biographers.

Whatever you do, just don't mention the 'B word' - Brexit lays bare Britain's class divide 

I was delighted to be invited to an exceptionally promising lunch - fine cooking guaranteed - in Wiltshire just before Christmas. Train schedules ordained that I arrived early, and this gave the hostess, an old friend, a chance to take me aside discreetly for a moment. "Don't," she said, "mention the B word, for heaven's sake! They're all Remainers here. We don't talk about the...

Fanny's Christmas legacy 

On Christmas Eve each year there is a lovely BBC tradition of broadcasting a carol service from King's College Cambridge, and that always starts off in the same way: a young solo chorister, with a voice of perfect clarity, begins the much-loved carol Once in Royal David's City. It's always an affecting moment, summing up so much that is comforting, peaceable and aesthetically uplifting about the tradition of the Christian Nativity.

Mary Kenny writes a 2017 Christmas Carol 

Marley was dead, to begin with. Eoin Scrooge knew that his business partner Marley was dead, as he had consigned the ashes himself to the crematorium. Personally, Eoin blamed Jake Marley's death on not really keeping up with the times, business-wise. He had brought so much stress on himself by being so old-fashioned, and muttering hopelessly outdated phrases such as, "Neither a lender nor a borrower be," or, "A penny saved is a penny earned." Imagine saving, with interest rates the way they are!

Bots, Brexit and Meghan 

In 2017, I learned: how to waste an enormous amount of time on Twitter. How bad-mannered and ill-tempered I can become on Twitter, in (perhaps imagined) contrast to being reasonably cordial in normal life. How to pronounce 'quinoa' - though I'd rather pronounce it than eat it. That the "new" cure-all therapy is sleep. Not all that new, though: the Victorians prescribed "bed rest" for every ailment.

Mary Kenny: Take the 'feminist test' 

Everyone claims to be a feminist these days - Meghan Markle has affirmed her feminist credentials. But feminism is a wide agenda, and that's why I wrote a book to try and clarify, to myself as well as others, what being a feminist now means. Are you a feminist? Take this test…

Mary Kenny: Songs of praise 

The wages of sin for 40 years of smoking is a wheezing chest and a possible diagnosis of a COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). When I was informed that I had a condition called bronchiectasis, a consultant at one of London's leading chest hospitals told me to go and join a choir, or take singing lessons. Singing, he said, was one of the best things you can do for your chest.

Mary Kenny: 'I saw some ghastly dumps while searching for new home' 

All of life's experiences come to an end, eventually, and I knew that one day I'd be booted out of the adorable, if somewhat ramshackle, Georgian flat that I have rented in Dublin's Kildare Street since 1996. The rent hadn't increased for 20 years - it had remained just under €800 monthly - although, on the other hand, there were structural faults with the apartment which mightn't have passed muster with Health and Safety: doors didn't close properly, there was an actual hole in the bathroom floor, the radiators hadn't worked for ages, and maintenance and repairs seemed scanty.

How Fido became Freddy 

The world is divided into those who favour dogs and those who favour cats: just now, dogs seem to be winning attention. Dog sociologists like John Bradshaw have observed that we are becoming much more anthropomorphic about doggies. Canine pets used to be given names like Rover or Fido: now they're christened (virtually) with much more human names, like Max or Sam, Hubert or Felicity.

Mary Kenny: When sirens called the shots 

I have before me a picture of Marlene Dietrich in her prime, sent by a friend in Berlin. It's taken soon after her 1930s debut in The Blue Angel, an erotic tale about a sedate professor who falls under the spell of a night-club singer. Dietrich played the role of femme fatale in many a film, when as a woman whose power is in her beauty and her compelling personality, she calls the shots.

Mary Kenny: The Romanovs' Irish nanny 

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 is seen as a stirring event, not unlike the Easter Rising of 1916: when an archaic and reactionary regime is replaced by a vital new leadership. Lenin and Trotsky are charismatic figures, even if the most powerful of the troika, Stalin, is now better known as a ruthless dictator.

Mary Kenny: Pimp or liberationist? 

When Hugh Hefner - founder of the famed Playboy empire - died last month, some feminists finally felt legally free to describe how they saw him. Suzanne Moore of The Guardian called him "a pimp" - as she had done during his lifetime, though under threat from his lawyers.

Mary Kenny: Postcards from the past 

It's pleasing to see shops in Ireland still display and sell pretty picture postcards. I hope that visitors are buying and sending them, but the postcard is not a thriving business, worldwide. The American postal service has been charting a progressive decline in postcard sending since 2010. Last month, in Britain, the oldest postcard publisher, J Salmon of Sevenoaks, announced its closure - put out of business by changing holiday habits and the instant gratification of social media. It's reckoned there's been a 60pc decline in the picture postcard over the past 20 years. People are taking more...

Mary Kenny: The teenage nightmare 

A British academic survey, the Millennium Cohort Study, has found that 24pc of adolescent girls at the age of 14 were depressed (compared with 9pc of boys). One of the authors, Praveetha Patalay of the University of Liverpool, said that: "Compared to previous generations, there seem to be increasing problems, particularly in girls." Twenty thoughts on this situation…

Mary Kenny: The petulant princess? 

It was always known among reporters who covered the British royal circuit that the late Princess Margaret was "difficult". She liked to be seen as a royal rebel and "with it" - in the lingo of the time - but people were warned that she'd seem friendly and approachable, and then suddenly pull rank. If those socialising with her alluded to "your sister", she would haughtily correct them with an icy "you mean, Her Majesty the Queen".

Mary Kenny: Lonely? Go solo! 

Loneliness in older life is a perennial problem; anyone who writes a problem page will tell you that. It's one of the reasons why many people don't like having to retire: it's not just that they lose contact with the daily life of work but because they feel less connected with what's going on. Maybe they feel less needed.

Mary Kenny: The diva who starved her voice 

Next Saturday, September 16, her adoring fans will gather together in many parts of the world to mark the 40th anniversary of the death of Maria Callas, whom they regard at the "greatest soprano ever".

Mary Kenny: Breaking ball 

Being the month of September our thoughts naturally turn to the sporting event of the season - the GAA finals. We're told that the GAA is "in our DNA", and in one sense it's true: anyone who has grown up in Ireland hears, in the background of memory (for those of a certain vintage, accompanied by the immortal voice of Michéal Ó Hehir) the excitement, enthusiasm and acclaim associated with the GAA activities.

Mary Kenny: No kidding! 

'How are you?" "I'm good." To which the correct answer is: "I was enquiring about your health, rather than your moral character." But the Americanism "I'm good" - instead of "I'm well" (or "fine", or the nice Hibernicism, "I'm grand") - is already so engrained that there is no hope of erasing it. It is probably derived from German "Ich bin gut": it's certainly not old English practice.

Mary Kenny: Diana's tragedy 

It would be an exaggeration to say that I knew Diana, Princess of Wales, but I met her, and it later transpired that she read what I wrote. Or maybe she just read the reports about herself: for she said to the editor of The Daily Telegraph (as he recounted subsequently), "Why can't you write nice things about me, like Mary Kenny?" I suppose I did write positively about Diana because she was a very winning personality, and seemed so unstuffy: she spoke rather simply to me about how she really would have liked to be a nurse, and how rewarding it was to look after people who were...

Mary Kenny: Dublin in the rare auld times 

What would our modern visitors think if they could travel back in time and visit Dublin 60 years ago? Well, I've just happened upon a guide to our capital city published in 1957, by an Anglo-Irish writer called Olivia Robertson. Her Dublin was both different and the same. She gazed at Dalkey and Killiney and compared it to Naples, as we still do, but she called the Sugar Loaf Mountain by its previous name - the Golden Spears Mountain.

Mary Kenny: Purr-fect summer reads 

Many writers have featured cats in their prose (or poetry): T.S. Eliot, Colette, P.G. Wodehouse, and a beguiling little cat appears in the first pages of Joyce's Ulysses. But maybe the most chilling feline story was written by the Gothic novelist Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat. It is a truly terrible tale - but also a gripping one - about a very disturbed man who is in the power of a "gin-nurtured… fiendish malevolence".

Mary Kenny: On the cards 

Have you ever considered walking out of your marriage or relationship? Have you ever had a career crisis where you thought "I've missed my vocation"? Have you ever asked "what should I do with my life?" Most people probably have.

Mary Kenny: He says, ze says 

Ever since I was made aware that folks from the city on the Foyle favoured different names for their home town ("Do you come from Derry?" "Yes, I come from Londonderry") I have believed that people should be called whatever the heck they like. So I have no problem with the transgender (or "intersex") pronoun "ze" replacing "he" and "her".

Don't shy away 

I felt sorry for Theresa May during the turbulent month of June because she was so widely blamed for having the wrong kind of personality. The British prime minister had a bad election campaign, seeming arrogant, aloof and unable to connect with people - so unlike her Labour rival, Jeremy Corbyn. She was savaged for not responding more spontaneously to the dreadful Kensington inferno at Grenfell Tower - while Mr Corbyn knew, instinctively, you just go to suffering victims and hug them. It's not Theresa's way. She can't.

Mary Kenny: Good old bad old days 

An animal charity in Britain, Spana, has found that half of adults over the age of 50 think that life was better in the past - only 19pc like it better today. But there are pros and cons in this debate, surely…

Class divides so evident after London fire can also be found closer to home 

Since the Grenfell Tower tragedy, London's Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is seen as a "metaphor for inequality". There's always been a posh element of London W8 and London W11, but extremes of health and deprivation have undoubtedly intensified since I lived there, first in the 1960s, and then the 1980s and '90s.

Mary Kenny: Marriage or master's? 

In the latter years of his life, my husband used to greet breathless announcements of new developments and events with the philosophical words: "'Twas ever thus!" In old age, you see the same themes of life returning as if in a cycle.

Mary Kenny: The town of kings 

Ah, Dún Laoghaire! It seemed like a glittering jewel from the Côte d'Azur in our childhood, whither we would travel on the CIE train, which preceded the Dart, to swim in those fabled Dún Laoghaire baths, and afterwards to partake of an ice-cream at the immortal Teddy's, served by the very dapper Teddy himself. On Sundays, it was my mother's pleasure to walk the length of the Dún Laoghaire pier, there to look out to sea mistily, pondering on the oceans further away, just as in the opening pages of Ulysses.

Mary Kenny: Generations in harmony 

Mothers and daughters: daughters with their mothers: that was one of the most striking images that emerged from the terrible Manchester atrocity. Ariana Grande's concert attracted, overwhelmingly, an audience of young people - which turned a wicked massacre into a tragedy of even greater dimensions - but it was evident that the family attendance was inter-generational.

Mary Kenny: Everyday sexism? 

Laura Bates's Everyday Sexism Project is a mission to document the varieties of sexism to which women are subjected in many countries. She's had an enormous response online and the book she wrote about the humiliations endured by respondents makes for depressing reading. Her reports on 'street harassment' alone make you wonder if the Victorians weren't right in providing chaperones for young ladies.

Mary Kenny: Soul sisters 

Feuds between sisters are well enough known: the movie stars Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland maintained a sisterly quarrel all their lives. The writers Margaret Drabble and her sister A.S. (Antonia) Byatt only meet - acknowledging each other with a formal nod - at funerals, never having patched up a family difference. Among the notorious Mitford sisters, Jessica was a Communist and Diana was a Fascist (and the mother of Desmond Guinness, who saved Georgian Dublin from destruction): throughout their adult lives they were not "on speakers".

Mary Kenny: Fallen woman 

It's a sad fact of life that the older you get, the more likely you are to fall. And not in a good way, like falling in love, or falling (as they say) pregnant. I mean tumbling to the ground because you've lost your balance.

If TDs won't stand for Dáil prayers, maybe 'Songs of Praise' will get them on their feet 

Prayers in Dáil Éireann? My alternative solution to this controversial question - since secularists continue to be opposed to it - is to begin proceedings with a hymn.

Mary Kenny: Vive la feminism 

Feminists all over the world clamour that "more women's voices must be heard". More women's voices in science, on business boards, in academia, in the media, and, above all, in politics. However, no feminists I can trace have praised the French Presidential candidate Marine le Pen as representing an advance for women's voices in politics. As Marion Anne Perrine le Pen has led the National Front party, and thus "the extreme far right", she is never seen as a role-model for women and she is not supported by feminist groups.

Mary Kenny: Dope talk 

When I open my email these days, I find it flooded with various commercial offers. Especially around cannabis products. Now is the right moment, I'm informed, to invest in cannabis. It's getting legal everywhere! It's a profitable product -and, besides, it helps with a range of illnesses "including chronic pain, anxiety, arthritis, diabetes, PTSD, strokes, cardiovascular disease, and even cancer".

Is Theresa the new Maggie? Not quite 

It's almost a cliché now to describe Theresa May as "the vicar's daughter": but it's an essential element of who she is, and she has frequently referred to herself in that way. The key to her character and formation is, indeed, the Church of England: Michael Gove has even referred to her as "Britain's first Catholic Prime Minister" because her background was High Church (and she also attended a convent school for a time).

Mary Kenny: The mating game 

Matchmaking today is done often via the internet - often successfully too - but previously, it was the job of the matchmakers either in person or through "marriage bureaux". London's best-known - and first official - marriage agency was started by Heather Jenner and her business partner Audrey Parsons in 1939 and the archives they left behind are a priceless record of how men and women looked for partners over the next decade.

Mary Kenny: Your funeral, your way 

If anyone plays Frank Sinatra's My Way at my funeral, I'll be mortified in more senses than one - the embarrassment of anyone finding out that secretly I rather loved this mawkish, self-pitying and self-justifying song, composed just 50 years ago. It's shamefully bombastic as it boasts and brags of the ego's achievements in "planning each chartered course", sometimes biting off "more than I could chew": but always standing tall and doing it "my way". It's been called "shamelessly self-mythologising" and "lamentable" by music critics. And yet, I have to admit, it gets to me every...

Every nation needs 'soft power' - our Mrs Brown has it in spades 

I was in Paris on the day that British Prime Minister Theresa May started the procedure to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union - the famous "triggering of Article 50" - and the air was thick with discussion among the political classes. The theme of 'perfide Albion' came up more than once, though no one quite recalled that General de Gaulle predicted Britain would never fit into a continental club anyway.

Mary Kenny: Grin and wear it 

A young man came to see me recently for what I thought was a business meeting. When I saw that he was wearing track suit trousers and a T-shirt, I knew the deal was off. If he was serious about the project he'd have been less casual in his semiotics (the study of signs and signals and their interpretation).

If Sinn Féin TDs want to talk about Nazis, they should look to their own party's history 

There's a contemporary adage about political debates that whoever first brings up a Nazi comparison in an argument, loses the argument. Nothing compares to the Nazi crimes and anyone who tries to inflate their talking-point by doing so seems absurd and insensitive.

Mary Kenny: Princesses over politics 

Honestly, I do wish Prince Harry would hurry up and get married. I'm not that fussy who he marries - this Meghan lass seems to be his heartfelt choice - just so long as he provides the world at large with the general spectacle of a royal wedding.

Criticising Foster isn't misogyny - it's just treating her like any other leader 

Arlene Foster certainly broke a political glass ceiling in Belfast when she became the first woman chosen to lead the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in 2015, a movement whose founding father, Ian Kyle Paisley, seemed the very epitome of an Old Testament patriarch.

Mary Kenny: Kiss me, I'm (now) Irish 

Our St Patrick's Day duties could be more onerous this year: a personal fáilte is surely due to the many individuals who have chosen to become Irish over the past nine months. I'm talking about those people who seldom previously thought of themselves as Irish who have applied for an Irish passport since the Brexit vote on June 23, 2016.

Mary Kenny: The leopard changes its spots 

Here's a blinding flash of the obvious: a study carried out at the University of Edinburgh has found that people change over the course of their lives. Between the ages of 14 and 77, profound shifts of personality occur: individuals alter "beyond recognition", according to the Scottish project - which was led by Mathew Harris, an academic brainbox, and examined the mental health of Scots over six decades.

Fake it until you make it - hypocrisy is the glue that holds society together 

Where would we be without a little hypocrisy?

Mary Kenny: The 'modern' wedding is an antique 

Jasmine works in a supermarket where she has the responsible job of checking that the items are always correctly priced. She is in her 30s and has been living with her boyfriend for a few years now, and to her great delight, in May of this year, they'll be getting married.

Women are used to calling shots on fertility - 'reversible vasectomy' will change this 

Developments in contraception are constantly in progress, and the boffins seem optimistic with the latest breakthrough in male contraception - the "reversible vasectomy".

Mary Kenny: Why is sorry the hardest word? 

The smart advice used to be: "Never apologise, never explain". Apologies and explanations may only remind the offended party of the offence taken, thus re-inflaming the wound, and so make things worse.

Mary Kenny: A Trump dynasty 

There's one set of liberals who should be pleased - even jubilant - about the ascent of President Donald Trump: those who uphold and champion the benefits of divorce. During our several divorce referenda, liberals advanced the claim that divorce could be good (as against defenders of traditional marriage, who said it broke up families).