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Sarah Carey Opinion Despicable as he was, An Garda Síochána can be grateful to very first commissioner, Eoin O’Duffy

Next Wednesday, an event in the Gresham Hotel will mark 100 years since Michael Collins chaired a meeting there to establish An Garda Síochána.

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Sarah Carey Opinion What better way for the church to prove its worth than by housing Ukrainian refugees?

I recently attended a local meeting of the Catholic Church’s synod – a global process of consultation with parishioners, initiated by Pope Francis to figure out how to renew a dying church. It was Tuesday, March 8, a sociable evening in which a consensus took about five minutes to emerge.

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Sarah Carey Opinion It is popular to say otherwise, but the truth is that our health system is getting better

This week I reflected on the wisdom of the people. They defeated the 2011 referendum to grant investigative powers to Oireachtas committees.

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Sarah Carey Opinion College entry doesn’t begin and end with dreaded points race – there are other routes

Sometimes you don’t have to go far to discover a whole new world. I was recently passing through Johnstown Estate, the lovely hotel up the road from us in Enfield, when I bumped into Catherine Fox.

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Sarah Carey Opinion This is not a Granny state. Things have to change, including the burning of our turf

This column may alienate my loyal rural audience, but I shall persist, because all I have to offer is my honest opinion. If the Cabinet took the same approach, we’d all be better off.

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Sarah Carey Opinion I didn’t expect switching banks to be easy, but I started in January and I’m still at it

Some disasters you never see coming. Others you can see a mile off. When Ulster Bank and KBC announced they were pulling out of Irish retail banking, it was an obvious disaster in the making. Transferring their estimated half-a-million customers to new banks was never going to be easy.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Yes, I miss Twitter, but culture of online anonymity fosters bullying, not activism

You’ve got to hand it to the Shinners. They do strategy. While government ministers gibber into the nearest microphone about topics such as who’s paying Tony’s salary and turf-burning and make off-the-cuff remarks about a half-formed policy idea they thought up five minutes ago, Sinn Féin strategists plan answers to foreseeable awkward questions.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Universal basic income is a utopian dream but ultimately, in practice, it is unworkable

When making policy, it’s always important to be clear about one’s objective. This week Culture Minister Catherine Martin launched a pilot programme to examine the effect of providing 2,000 artists with a basic income of €325 per week for three years.

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Sarah Carey Opinion ‘If anyone wants to use the electric shower in my house they will have to present a business case to me’

It’s important to develop new interests in life. New grudges are fun too. I’m nurturing one against the ubiquitous “we”.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Our efforts to welcome Ukrainians can be used as a blueprint to tackle housing crisis

My brother-in-law works for the Department of Social Protection, and last weekend gave me a first-hand account of the reception centre for Ukrainian refugees at Dublin Airport, where he had been volunteering.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Like Jesus in the temple, the Church must turn over some tables and fight for social justice if it is to save itself

Since so many people get it wrong, I relish the rare occasions one can use the word “literally” correctly. When I say the Catholic Church in Ireland is literally dying, it really is. The church is the people, and unlike most columnists who comment on Catholicism, I go to mass and see the empty spaces where my neighbours used to sit.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Pacifist beliefs are tested, but when tanks arrive, it’s too late to debate the morality of war​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

SIN is an unfashionable word. But waging war is a terrible sin. And those exhilarated when watching it on telly are sinning too. It’s not a game and I can’t watch.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Inflation will make us tighten our belts and prioritise the things we value above others

I have almost given up on public broadcasting. The polarised debates of radio and television are designed to just rile people up – the success metric for media executives.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Personal power to create positive outlook can change paradigm and reduce isolation

I read something about Madonna the other day, about how she made her own luck. I’ve mixed feelings about statements like that. Some people have really bad luck, even if they do everything right.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Power struggle between Pope and Order of Malta is like watching a Netflix thriller

I often declare my Fine Gael connections, but I have a Fianna Fáil card to play too. My mother is a cousin of Phil Brady, a popular Fianna Fáil TD until 1977 when his son, Gerard, succeeded him in the old Dublin South East constituency.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Having to learn Irish for a job is unfair on those who didn’t get the chance to do so

Regular readers know I keep a suspicious eye on the toxic effects of nationalism. Unlike religion, which must continually apologise for itself, nationalism poses benignly with Yeats and Riverdance.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Society’s refusal to treat politicians with fairness will eventually backfire on us all

Hot takes during a political scandal are a risky business. I read my ‘Golfgate’ column from August 2020 yesterday, wondering if it stood up to subsequent events. It did.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Just like mother and baby homes, there is a reckoning coming for the act of surrogacy

In the painful conversation over mother and baby homes, the voices of adult children seeking their birth mothers were finally heard. But there were also those who couldn’t give their perspective because they had secrets to keep or felt their stories weren’t wanted. They included mothers who didn’t want to be traced, children who didn’t want to trace them and the adopting parents.

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Sarah Carey Opinion It’s important for all of us to remember humanity is the only identity that matters

On Monday I listened to BBC Radio 4’s latest episode of In Our Time about the gold standard – the system by which a country’s currency was backed by gold.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Peace-loving and silent, the Quakers still get things done

Organised religion has, understandably, a rather bad name. It’s hard to find one unsullied by persecution, discrimination and oppression. Yet religion flourishes. Many people need faith, discipline, community and ritual in their lives. Apart from the objectively positive contributions religious institutions have made to society, religious practice is strongly associated with well-being and healthy ageing. But it seems almost impossible to find a faith without institutional infestation of humanity’s many failings.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Hard-wired optimism makes it difficult to heed worrying predictions and warnings

Often, when I try to figure out the modern world, I end up reflecting it isn’t very modern at all. Take the tricky matter of predictions. Our desperation to know the future is utterly primal, as is our denial when told what it will be. Cassandra was the Greek priestess cursed to make accurate predictions but never to be believed. The archetype exists for a very good reason.

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Sarah Carey Opinion How Dickens captured what might be, what is and what’s to come in one story

It’s time to confess my dirty literary secret. I’ve always loved reading, but avoided Charles Dickens. In some circles this is a deep moral failing. In my defence, I was marked by glimpses of grim television dramatisations in childhood.

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Sarah Carey Opinion The uncertainty of Covid, rather than the virus itself, is the elephant in the room

In between Christmas baking and panicking this week, I watched an online seminar on epidemiological modelling. When Cathal Walsh, Professor of Statistics at the University of Limerick, got to the part about the “Funnel of Uncertainty”, I felt the power of diagnosis.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Sitka spruce snobbery is holding us back from growing a renewable building material

Last Saturday, I headed to Leitrim to investigate the Sitka spruce wars. People get very upset about Sitka spruce. Farmers and foresters can’t get licences to thin and fell trees planted decades ago. Objectors say Sitka spruces are horrible trees, squeezing out farming and native species. The debate is framed as nature versus money and good trees versus bad. I wanted to see for myself.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Leaders are obliged to lead because people crave a sense of authority in unstable times

I find myself in an unusual position. I want Fianna Fáil to do well.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Where our Christmas traditions draw from other cultures, we need to acknowledge that debt

“Cultural appropriation” is one of those terms that, while having some substance at its core, is deployed so promiscuously it often serves to irk rather than enlighten.

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Sarah Carey Opinion How a phone mast gave me the chance to meet a great scholar and enlightened man

Last week, my son’s learner driver permit arrived in the post, Frank McNally wrote about lighthouses in bogs in the Irish Times and archaeologist George Eogan died.

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Sarah Carey Opinion If Covid is not a short-term crisis but a new normal, fine. Let’s plan for that

MANAGING the virus is one thing. Managing the public mood is another. Maintaining morale is just as important as containing Covid. On no account – none – should the mood of the country be trivialised as an indulgence.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Biggest obstacle to sorting out the housing crisis is the public’s horror of ‘other people’

On Monday, I chaired The Housing Agency’s conference, which was addressed by the Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien. I was impressed. He was brimming with energy and determination and showed how new policies are already being implemented.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Stigma around menopause means women have little choice but to endure it in silence

I don’t deliberately set out to be contrary. It’s just that I often end up looking at the world and wondering is it me, or has everyone else gone completely mad? Take this menopause awareness business. For months now, the media has been overrun with detailed accounts of how women between 45 and 55 are suffering from debilitating physical and mental impairments and need lots of “understanding”. All I can think is: Why are you undoing 100 years of feminism?