It sounds like a rude sort of phrase but ‘pulling a Peter’ is about to enter the lexicon of Irish politics. Haven’t you heard it yet? It’s Irish for finding a handy target, preferably an ethnic minority, then accusing it of criminality and in turn blaming it for all our economic ills, in order to win [...]
My childhood memories are filled with holy statues, the smell of incense, the sound of pews squeaking on a tiled floor in an echoey church. Visits to the crib and offkey hymns were Christmas. The somewhat gory sight of the Virgin Mary’s foot crushing a snake fascinated me during primary school assemblies, and the comforting Sunday [...]
We live in an age of unprecedented equality between parents, but, almost three years in, I can confirm that it’s news to many people that men can be parents too. Many of my female friends out-earn their husbands and partners. Sometimes, the early rationale for their career decisions included an expectation that the man would take [...]
Sometimes when you’re scrolling mindlessly through your social media feeds, something jumps out at you that challenges your world view to such a degree that you begin to seriously question everything you thought you knew. While the social media companies do their best to prevent this from happening - working hard to make sure we see [...]
Gillette has been marketed for donkey’s years as ‘the best a man can get’. It’s a pretty simple slogan - our product is better than the others, you should buy it, end of. But the slogan has been repurposed for the post #MeToo era in a way that is causing absolute outrage among a certain cohort [...]
It’s easy to blame Church and State for all the ills that have blighted Irish society. Warehousing the poor in workhouses; separating children from their parents in industrial schools for the crime of poverty; enslaving women in Magdalene laundries for the crime of pregnancy. But those whose ancestors incarcerated women with the temerity to bear children [...]
I grew up looking at images of ‘heroin chic’ supermodels, for whom nothing tasted better than how thin felt. 1990s beauty standards were defined by Kate Moss’s protruding ribs, while teen girls’ magazines warned of an epidemic of anorexia and bulimia. https://www.flickr.com/photos/9355127@N07/35710732331/in/photostream/ The term body-shaming hadn’t been coined yet, but the rise of magazines outlining [...]
When Gay Byrne spoke to Ray D’Arcy this week about the TV show, ‘Once More With Feeling: The Meaning of Life’, which aired last night, we all perked up a little bit, and listened. Perhaps because of his reticence in expressing his opinions over the years, Gaybo has been conferred, as he ages, with an almost [...]
It’s been labelled a ‘furore’ but a supposed controversy about Jennifer Lawrence in a skimpy dress on a cold day is the very definition of a storm in a B cup. J Law, who’s got more attitude in her little finger than most Hollywood starlets put together, was snapped at an event promoting her new film [...]
It’s a truth rarely acknowledged in Irish politics that, well, the truth is rarely acknowledged in Irish politics. Families are ‘hardworking’, even those who aren’t. All pensioners are lonely and impoverished. The middle classes are ‘squeezed’, even when they demonstrably are well able to afford two cars and three holidays a year. The over 70s [...]
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