New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern gave birth yesterday to a beautiful baby girl. Mother, baby, and soon to be stay-at-home Dad are reportedly all doing well. She will take six weeks’ maternity leave, and her husband will take over childcare duties after that. The overwhelming reaction online was ‘Woman gives birth. So what?’. But it’s [...]
My enthusiasm for women and feminism is lifted every year by the sense of solidarity on two dates - Women's Christmas, and International Women's Day. This year I spent Women's Christmas speaking with Cork Simon's Colette O'Brien and Karen Songhurst at the Cork Simon Women's Christmas Lunch. And in time-honoured tradition my mother and sister-in-law [...]
Today is UN Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Rwanda Genocide. The country’s President Paul Kagame has just completed a European tour, including a visit to Aras an Uachtarain last week. While in Ireland, he donated €50,000 to help build a robot for Cork’s Joanne O’Riordan. When Kagame’s RPF ended the genocide by invading [...]
Rosie-the-Riveter (Photo credit: SBT4NOW) This week, Fianna Fáil launched a plan to get more women involved in the party. Senator Averil Power, one of the party’s two female Oireachtas members, launched the plan with party leader Micheál Martin and Niamh Gallagher of Women for Election, a non-partisan training body that is focussed on improving [...]
Mary Lou McDonald had to fight for maternity leave from the Dail - there is currently no provision for this. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I wrote this piece in March after a trip to Rwanda to meet women politicians there, and after spending about four months shadowing and interviewing women politicians in Ireland. I just [...]
Our Western images of Africa are of colourful women with babies on their backs, not business suit-clad women with laptops. They're of starving children, not well-fed men about town sipping lattes in indigenous coffee chains that bear striking resemblances to Costa or Starbucks, but with better food. This is Kigali. We're here to research the success [...]
Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa AND has very fertile soil. This is how that works out. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) At the moment I am busy making plans for a trip to Rwanda in February. I received funding from Irish Aid's Simon Cumbers Media Fund last summer for a project on [...]
