Why I’m running 5k a day in September for Women’s Aid
Why Women’s Aid? It should be easy to explain, but somehow it’s not. It was an easy choice – absolutely – and there’s no shortage of reasons. But maybe that’s the thing. There are so many reasons, so where do you even start? How do you ever do it justice?
Grief at a time of Advent
You can joke all you want about emigrants pathetically insisting on attempting to recreate a past that no longer exists. But it’s when I relive that past that the hole shaped like her is suddenly so painfully gaping and obvious.
On International Men’s Day, won’t someone think of the fathers?
Personally, I’m a little surprised that we need a survey to conclude that increased parenting responsibilities tend to add to your stress levels, and that unpaid house and caring work on top of a paid job does indeed take its toll. All over Ireland, there are mothers who could tell you that.
On how you can’t win as a feminist in a capitalist patriarchy – or, the right to choose not to play ball
I justify wearing make-up, if far from every day, but I’ve vowed not to discuss my weight or talk about body fat as a bad thing. I draw lines in sometimes arbitrary places, justifying them to myself as I go, knowing that perfection is a goal that would break me but that, as a feminist, I have to try.
A waste of space of a man – on mammy memes and narratives of fatherhood
I can’t escape the feeling that the labels matter. If, when we vent, we make parenting synonymous with mothering, we’re doing everyone – not least mothers – a huge disservice. If we want to change the fact that women are walking away from their jobs in droves because it just makes no financial sense for their higher-earning partners to quit, we need to change the notion of ‘woman’ meaning mother meaning maternity leave and sick days while ‘man’ means none of those things, ever.
Thoughts on sharing birth stories
The reality is that if a person fears birth and the various things that could possibly go wrong, the way to reassure her is not to silence those who have gone before her and pretend that she’s imagining the risks and it’s all in her head.
Be grateful and stop moaning – or, why we need to talk about home-schooling
As thousands of households all over the country are grappling with this new normal, the narrative of maternal super powers isn’t helping. Let me tell you, I feel nothing like a superhero. I feel exhausted and sad and insufficient a lot of the time.
Starting the new decade right: on solidarity, ‘lagom’ and #GE2020
As we get closer to the next General Election, the Tory landslide over in the UK still reverberating in the air, I worry that the Irish are just too keen on giving out of their own pockets – at their own discretion and judgement – to ever give up on the low taxation and minimal financial redistribution that have caused the very problem their charity aims to fix.
On mob rule, female rage, and the death of a Swedish star
I’ve been thinking a lot about rage lately. I carry it around – sometimes simmering and undefined, other times clear and, to me, entirely sensible. For many women, this rage has had a natural outlet in recent years thanks to the global #metoo movement, the abortion rights movement here in Ireland, and a number of other movements and platforms for feminist mobilisation and organising – but justified though that rage may seem, we are continuously told that we should tone it down. We’re coming across as just a bit hysterical.
How I cried my way to a free smear test
I lost it, and I cried, and I knew it wasn’t her fault but it was the final straw: it was yet another piece of evidence of a broken system that fails women every day, one that failed women who are no longer with us, and their families, and every woman who has since lost faith in the system.
Angry in company
The question was posed many times in the past few months: What will we do with all this time when we repeal? But the announcement was not even out long enough for the tears of relief to have started to dry when the restlessness set in. Where next with this broken world?
Whom do you trust?
The evidence shows that it makes sense: you can trust women to make their own reproductive decisions. No floodgates tend to open, and they don’t tend to go off having a load of abortions – that’s what the statistics say. They still have kids, families still prosper, despite the lack of a constitutional amendment forcing them to. It just seems unlikely, shocking almost. Trusting a man is easier, somehow – even when the evidence shows he’s a murderer.
Change or no change - let's talk about fears
The type of abortion you fear is already happening, and there is nothing you can do about that; the type of suffering you’d like to help minimise, however, you have a very real chance to do something about.
Love thy neighbour
She’s a lovely woman. She often stops by to chat when she’s on her way somewhere and my two sons are playing in the front garden. She tells me they’re adorable, such a gift. And she’s right – they are a gift. She means it in a slightly different way to how I see it, of course; she thinks of them as gifts from God. But we agree that they’re a blessing, if in a non-religious sense for me.
Toy guns and toxic masculinity
We’re all products of the society we grow up in. Put a toy gun in the hands of your three-year-old, and you can’t be surprised when they turn to violence in their teens or struggle to solve problems by talking things through.
No woman is an island
“Happiness is within,” so the self-help books say. But what is self-help if the self needs help, reaching out and away for respite, for togetherness? Sure happiness must be within when the outside and beyond is cold and lonely, bills unpaid and children hungry, wombs a battlefield and homes hollow as ghosts. You must find strength within to get up early in the morning, pay your taxes, look after your own, never complain – good man. When there’s no such thing as society and Thatcher rests in peace, take a deep breath, try yoga.
To the woman who told me all my child needed was a hug
You came into our lives at about 8.10am this morning. I was standing outside my house, my youngest kid kitted out and ready to go, his older brother screaming hysterically at the top of his lungs, quite possibly waking every single person in Drumcondra our side of Griffith Park.
So you think you were hired on merit? Gender quotas and the perception gap
I think the thing that makes gender quotas hard for some liberals to stomach is that, in contrast to issues like bodily autonomy and ending violence against women, they don’t seem quite as immediately right and fair. If equality is what we want, surely we should be treating everyone equally?
Infighting on the left and a real left-wing alternative
In the aftermath of #coponcomrades, and after a couple of years of complete lack of consensus around Corbyn’s Labour leadership in the UK, it is easy to feel like the infighting on the left has become a pet peeve of many, interestingly especially those who aren’t actually that far out on the left. And I’m starting to feel frustrated by it. Not the infighting, that is – but the opinions.
Police brutality and punching down
All cops aren’t bastards, yet everything they touch turns to muck. Records of millions of imaginary breath tests; false allegations of sexual abuse, leaked personal information, lives ruined. Once entangled in a system of corrupt power relationships, even the most well-intended citizen will struggle to tell right from wrong.