November is the month of the dead: traditionally in Ireland, the month of the Holy Souls. Elsewhere, all over Europe, ceremonies to mourn and remember the dead are held. Each November, as an Irish person resident in England (though, when Covid regulations permit, regularly in Ireland) I am faced with the same dilemma: do I…
Ever since I became interested in feminism – it was back in 1967, while in New York – I’ve observed that feminists have been concerned with one prevailing issue. This was sometimes defined as ‘having it all’ – the founder-editor of modern Cosmopolitan magazine Helen Gurley Brown coined that phrase. The British author Shirley Conran…
I am a firm supporter of freedom of speech and of expression. Debate is essential. Even when a saintly person is being considered for canonisation there is the tradition of ‘the devil’s advocate’ – to give a hearing to the adversarial view. Ideas have to be tested. Even wrong ideas deserve an airing because we can…
House of Cards, a novel by Alice Curtayne (Cluny Classics, £14.50/$17.95) We often hear it said that before the rise of modern feminism, marriage was seen as the summum bonum of a woman’s ambitions. In Alice Curtayne’s compelling novel, first published in 1939, an Irishwoman makes it indignantly clear that this was not the case in…
One of the most mendacious aspects of the Dying with Dignity bill, it seems to me, is calling it ‘dying with dignity’. It is an assisted suicide measure, and if truth meant anything in the public realm, that is what it should be called. ‘Dying with dignity’ is a propaganda phrase which deliberately implies that…
The Belfast-born poet Derek Mahon, who died last week, aged 78, after a short illness, was rightly acclaimed as one of the finest poets of our time. I knew Derek (along with his late wife Doreen) as a friend and a neighbour – when our children were young they played together in London’s Kensington. The…
We all grow a little more forgetful with the passing of the years, and it is well-established that the ageing brain experiences some cognitive deterioration. But there are ways to mitigate this process, namely: activity, nutrition, and social and intellectual stimulation. And, I regret to say that over the past six months of the Covid…
President Trump has said that, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, he intends to nominate another woman to be a Judge in the American Supreme Court. That’s great! There are two leading, clever women lawyers who are candidates. In an era when gender balance is upheld as an ideal, you might think that there…
Years ago, the Vintners Association of Ireland were concerned that the Pioneer movement would exert sufficient influence on the Government to restrict the opening hours of public houses. But how gentle and civilised were the advocates of temperance in comparison to the ferocious damage being wrought by the Covid pandemic, and the nostrums of those…
Thursday of this week – September 10 – was marked as World Suicide Prevention Day, and a very good cause this is. The prevention of suicide is heart-breakingly necessary, as anyone who has lost someone they loved in this way knows. The fact that families often cling to the view that a tragic death was…