My friend the psychoanalyst gave me great advice once: "Name It". Dr Ciara Kelly - in a fine piece in the Irish Independent last Monday - extracted some shrapnel from this BBC/Kevin Myers incendiary...
Though I'm a regular consultant of Dr Google, I'm not one to presume the worst. So when I noticed a bothersome lump under my arm, I diagnosed myself cautiously. Nothing about my putative tumour fulfilled the criteria for cancer. It was moveable and tender. Cancer presents as a hard,...
I'm occasionally accused of being a conservative but when it comes to education I'm actually a radical. Given a blank slate, I'd be Finland. In the 1990s, in the teeth of a recession and dealing with big...
The centre must hold! That's what they say and that's what I preach when the threat of mere anarchy is let loose upon the world. And sure enough, despite all that has been thrown at us,...
The row over Donald Trump's Muslim ban reminded me of my own difficulties entering the US. I always get through, because presumably international terrorists don't look like pale-skinned Irish pixies.
Something quite bizarre and unexpected happened last week that took me completely by surprise. Forget about Donald Trump: I turned out to be right. That never happens. When Senior Counsel Sean Guerin issued a government report wordily entitled A Review of the Action Taken by An Garda Siochana Pertaining to Certain Allegations Made by Sergeant Maurice McCabe in May 2014, Alan Shatter was forced to resign. Guerin criticised him to the point that Taoiseach Enda Kenny, weary of a stream of apparent scandals emerging from the Department of Justice, informed the besieged...
The population's political preferences are often categorised on spectrums, ranging from Left to Right or liberal to conservative. But when it comes to the Irish, choice is a more useful indicator of political feeling. Irish people want to choose their schools, hospitals, transport, homes and all manner of services that our relatively content socialist friends on the continent cheerfully agree...
Before I get to the maths of public transport, let me reflect on human nature. Most of us form opinions based on emotion rather than reason and then seek out those facts that comfort us best. When I found myself shouting "Up The Workers!" at my bus-driver neighbour on his way to the picket, I knew why I was cheering.
Even as the scene unfolded, I felt I was in a play. Picture a messy, feminine attic bedroom. The poor girl who got her Leaving Certificate results that morning sat up in bed, still in her pyjamas, quilt pulled around her. Sobbing, she brushed her long hair back off her face whilst taking a drag from a cigarette, intensely typing at her laptop; presumably chatting to her classmates or that boyfriend we didn't like.
There was a great laugh in Newstalk this week because Sean Moncrieff was hosting a nude outside broadcast. There were even more laughs when I reminded colleagues I'd visited a nudist colony last year and got the old kit off. And it's weird, I feel more comfortable talking about taking my clothes off than talking about going to Mass. What does the nudist stuff say about me? That I'm a liberal with a sense of humour? What does going to Mass say? That I'm one of Them. And you don't want to be one of Them, do you?
I spend most of my time at the end of a cul de sac in Co Meath. So when I was swanning around Dublin 2 on Friday afternoon and bumped into Oliver Sears, I seized the chance to get an opinion...
You'd think the sheer predictability of moral panic around sex and middle-class kids would have tripped some alarm in newsrooms. When reports surfaced that 200 male Agricultural Science students in...
Lucinda Creighton displayed her gift for attracting publicity this week in a well-timed launch of Renua's election manifesto. Alas, the document was exposed as an amateur affair.
Quotas. Quotas. Quotas. It's all about women and quotas these days.
There's no doubt about it: there's a single tyrannical narrative in this country, and every personal tragedy that can be, must be shoehorned into the official view - that the Eighth must go.
I was busy last week. Like most people. I raced between domestics and school pick-ups and meetings. In the background, blipping into my consciousness, were snippets of the Taoiseach's visit to Washington.
One broaches the subject of caesarean sections gingerly, knowing this thorny subject will raise hackles among women who can extract a sense of inadequacy from any of their life's accomplishments. Doctors get a tad shrill, too, when challenged on the subject. But as our national section rate breaches 30pc, it behoves any commentator on matters of public health to cease hiding behind the "no judgment!" defence.
As the lambing season takes off, the Irish Farmers' Association has urged dog owners to make sure their pets are locked up at night. Any mutt will merge with a frenzied pack and tear a sheep to pieces. My uncle once found a ewe stuck in mud with half its face eaten off by a terrier.
In previous missives, I've mentioned that my husband was obliged during the worst of the recession to ply his wares abroad. He was never exactly ecstatic heading off to the airport; but my mother, who is right about everything, used to proclaim: "It could be worse! He could be on the M50!"
Several years ago, I managed to wangle an invitation to a dinner in UCD when Bill Clinton was visiting Ireland. He gave an amazing speech; full of scientific, historical and literary references.
Memo to the boss: I want double the usual fee for this column because I've just had to watch the most execrable muck so I can make the following important announcement to our readers: "It's official. The End of Days has come."
Regular readers will know that I live in Enfield. It's a fairly inconsequential village, but we have a geographic peculiarity that has taught me much about the human condition. Enfield is in Co Meath, but we're surrounded by Kildare on three sides.
Naturally, as a teenager, I knew that my parents were wrong about everything. Then I grew up and accepted that perhaps they were right after all. As middle-age crashes in on me, I worry that my teenage self might have had a point. While I raged and slammed doors, they preached stoicism.
The sublime Frank McNally of The Irish Times once neatly captured the life of a columnist when he described sitting outside a cafe and glancing over to where he'd parked his bicycle. When he realised the bike was gone, he said he had two thoughts. First, that his bicycle had been stolen. Second, that he could get a column out of it.
Technically my children have five grandparents. My parents, my husband's parents and my uncle - a bachelor farmer who is a daily part of our lives. Every day, but particularly since this wretched recession hit us, I bless my great fortune that they're there, holding us up in the bad days, making our lives joyful in the good ones.
When awful pictures of war and famine and death appear on the news, I have to turn off the telly straight away. I can't cope with it. My husband says I'm wrong. He says even if it's upsetting, the least you can do is bear witness. I plead that my precious feelings won't relieve the pain and misery of a victim one iota. In fact, wallowing in sympathy for victims, whilst doing nothing constructive to relieve their suffering, is self-indulgent. But he usually has the remote control and I end up leaving the room.
I never cease to be stung when I find myself on the receiving end of moral judgment.
It's hard to explain sometimes to my journalistic colleagues how their presumptions and prejudices on major policy issues are so wildly alienating to anyone who lives in the country.
Three dots joined up this week to reveal a grim precursor of 2016.
Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign strategist James Carville came up with the famous "It's the economy, stupid" line; launching not just Clinton's presidential campaign but an electoral cliche. It's behind the Taoiseach's repeated assurances that there'll be no election until 2016. The longer he waits, the more jobs there'll be, and the more votes to go with them. Employed people will vote for political stability and economic growth, not headbangers, stupid.
A few weeks ago, we were staying at one of those brilliant French campsites. It had fantastic facilities, including a "balneo" - a kind of walled garden, laid out in classical Roman style. It was stone-tiled, with columns, hot tubs, cool pools and nice planting. It was for over-16s only and, until one o'clock each day, clothes were banned. As soon as I saw the sign, I knew it would be professionally remiss of me not to see what the nudists were up to. For the purposes of journalistic enquiry, I'd have to strip.
In one way, Emma Murphy is better off than some victims. She has a black eye. Something to show.
My mother reared us to believe that wasting a doctor's time was evidence of poor character. Even though this policy resulted in my giving birth at home unexpectedly because I didn't want to raise the alarm unnecessarily, it's hard to shake off the policies one is taught as a child. After all, this is a woman who apologised for making a fuss when she phoned the Doctor-On-Call when my father was on the floor clutching his chest in the throes of a heart attack.
There's nothing worse than ending up on the wrong side of the Single Narrative; for this is the virtually unassailable mechanism by which most public affairs are presented.
The report from Nama to Finance Minister Michael Noonan isn't saying much we didn't already know: house prices in Dublin are recovering faster than the rest of the country and nothing is going to change that for the foreseeable future. And yet, that rubber stamp on the reality of the two-tier recovery is a grim moment for anyone living outside Dublin. Was rural Ireland's death warrant just signed?
I was up to my eyes in Newstalk on Saturday morning, preparing for my turn to anchor referendum coverage, when I heard Senator David Norris chatting loudly as he waited to go on air.
When they suggest that I interview Rosanna Davison, I have mixed feelings. I'm a real nosey parker and love the opportunity to suss out public people, but the celebrity-model circuit is not my beat. I'm also a bit anxious. I've been a bit run down recently and am somewhat wan; my hair is past help; my clothes don't fit. I am not beauty-queen ready. Technically, I'm being sent to judge her. Instead, I'm afraid she'll judge me.
I thought I had forgiven the Greens. It's hard to stay mad at those guys. They're so wholesome, earnest, noble, decent. But anyone could have told them putting Fianna Fail back into power was a bad idea. I definitely did.
In a recent domestic scene, I declared to my children that one needed the patience of Job to put up with them. I was appalled when my lamentation was greeted with, "Who's Job?"
Well now. Isn't this interesting? According to classical economic theory, when people have less money, they have fewer children. But several years ago I suggested that Irish women were responding to the financial crisis by getting preggers. A life-affirming, opportunity-cost thing.
Irish people are funny. They can be libertarian, contrary, conservative and complicated. Two sets of figures in today's poll reveal these characteristics neatly: 76pc and 45pc.
Curse you Maurice McCabe! Curse you! That's what I thought when I received a notice informing me that a rotten GoSafe van, lurking just inside a 60kmh speed limit sign had caught me doing 75kmh at 10am on a sunny Tuesday morning. I was being fined €80 and getting three penalty points on my licence. I was raging! The €80 I could live with. The three points drove me bonkers. What would it do to my insurance? This was just typical.
I wish politicians had more backbone. It's so annoying to watch them cave into pressure, be it from Germans, lawyers waving the Constitution or journalists getting their knickers in a twist about 'perceived' conflicts of interest. And it really bugs me to see politicians, cowed by media mobs, abandon a core value actually worth keeping - loyalty - and dump on a colleague when he's the...
'Taoiseach, would you please consider reappointing Valerie O'Reilly to the board of the NTA. A woman, bright, intelligent and not bad-looking either! Michael Lowry."
I never watch Tonight with Vincent Browne because I don't approve of blood sports. But when my husband was channel-flicking last Monday night, I spotted the fabulous Catriona Lynch on the panel and shrieked for him to pause there. A regular on my Newstalk show, Catriona is president of Curam, an organisation for stay-at-home parents, and I love the way she says things even I'm...
I'm not saying I come out of this story very well. I'm just asking: why are Irish myths so profoundly miserable that a noble effort to read my child The Children of Lir ended in a psychodrama, with the pages hysterically torn from the book? And I was doing the ripping. I know. I know.
The movie about Stephen Hawking, for which Eddie Redmayne won an Oscar, is called The Theory of Everything. That's because Hawking solved a big problem in physics by unifying the theory of big things (space) and the theory of small things (atoms) into one single theory. In physics, this was apparently, a very good thing.
Eeeeuw. Tricky, Paul. Tricky. That's what I thought as I watched Paul Murphy on The Late Late Show.
Last week, I said I liked authentic people. Clare Daly is authentic. Unlike some of the privileged posh boys who share her politics, she's an actual working-class woman, overcoming both snobbery and sexism to win her rightful place in Irish politics.
Last year my favourite word was "authentic". I liked "authentic" people, even if I disagreed with them. My new favourite word is "binary": I've diagnosed it's the reason behind the rot of public discourse. One must be either for or against; in or out; left or right; liberal or conservative. Perhaps it's because I live in the middle of Ireland, but I often find myself in the middle ground.
Like Alphonso X of Castile, one is always tempted to declare: "Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe".
Equality Minister Aodhan O Riordain is proposing that the upcoming Family Leave Bill will provide two weeks paid paternity leave.
My husband told me some great news last week. He got a job!
On August 1, 2012, in less than 45 minutes, a global financial services company called Knight Capital lost $440m on the stock exchange. Like many other similar companies, it was heavily reliant on automatic high-frequency trading - a computer-driven system that has displaced those guys you see in weird jackets on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. That day, the software went mad and the humans watched in horror as it lost Knight Capital $10m a minute. It destroyed the company.
I process things slowly. That I'll admit. So it wasn't until I was interviewing Kieran Rose, from the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, (GLEN) on Newstalk last weekend, that the penny finally dropped. We were discussing recent rulings made by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) against RTE and Newstalk. Rose began to talk about a Prime Time show on RTE in 1993 when homosexuality was being decriminalised. (Can you believe that was only 1993?).
Coping with change is never easy. With Ray D'Arcy's wife Jenny Kelly and co-producer and presenter Mairead Farrell leaving his show on Today FM, all would have changed for him.
'It's the little things." Isn't that what they say? It was a little thing that provided a key moment of self-revelation almost 10 years ago. We'd just moved into our new house. I had a 14-month-old, and a six-week-old baby. I was breastfeeding joyfully and had a granite-topped island unit. Could life get any better? Making a sandwich one day in my flash, new German kitchen, I opened the cutlery drawer, gleaming with recently unpacked wedding cutlery.
I’ve been listening to the water charges row with a certain sense of distance, and that’s not a metaphor.
I'VE been listening to the water charges row with a certain sense of distance, and that’s not a metaphor.
I doubt there was anyone who gave the Greens a harder time than me when they were in government.
Freezing your female employee’s eggs? And they call this progress? It’s grotesque.
I've been circling in on the theory of late that liberals have replaced Catholics as the principal source of dogmatism in our intolerant little isle.
From the suffragettes to second-wave feminists - generations of warrior women fought a fight so we didn't have to. But what, she asks, have we done with this great feminist legacy?
The death of Ian Paisley revealed that the tradition of not speaking ill of the dead is not universal.
Poor Niamh Horan.
Just last year we were commemorating the 1913 Lockout and nostalgia reigned.
The Tuam babies story presents us with the usual depressing challenges, but some hope.
Today is the final day of the Green Ribbon Campaign, a month-long initiative to get people talking about their mental health.
THE “debate” on school patronage kicked off by the teacher conference season is as predictable as ever.
OPINION polls indicate a significant majority in favour of gay marriage, which should provide comfort to campaigners.
I wish this was ancient history, but it's not.
What do riots achieve except scaring away investors and tourists?
AROUND the due date of my third and most recent baby, Teresa McCreery, one of the Community Midwives, looked at me perplexed. 'The baby's head is down and well fixed. You should be in labour. Is there anything stopping you from having this baby?" "Primal fear of death?" I offered.
This is my Seamus Heaney story, though it's really a Bill Clinton story. Three years ago, I swung a ticket to a dinner in UCD with Bill Clinton and 2,000 other people.
A group of non-politicians has formed to support the abolition of the Seanad. They call themselves 'One House' because "one house is enough".
If you were looking for a reason to abolish the Seanad, look no further than the has-beens and wannabes scrambling to its defence.
