by Barbara | Dec 9, 2016 | Uncategorized
Raising kids is not a job for the faint-hearted. Babies and toddlers are a lot of physical work but parenting teenagers would melt the most robust brain. They say girls are harder to raise than boys. I wouldn’t know. I only have girls. Two of them teenagers. But I...
by Barbara | Aug 4, 2016 | Uncategorized
The opportunity to hear feminist legend Gloria Steinem was the magnet that drew me to West Cork. As soon as news broke about her coming to Bantry as part of the West Cork Literary Festival I was online booking my ticket. It was going to be a long drive for a quick...
by Barbara | Jun 8, 2016 | Uncategorized
I will say one thing for Niamh Horan, she’s brave. Having sent Twitter into meltdown two weeks on Brendan O Connor’s The Cutting Edge on RTE One, she continued on her theme of women not ‘being able to have it all’ in the following week’s Sunday Independent. But...
by Barbara | Apr 21, 2016 | Religious Orders, Uncategorized
Every year, on the Sunday before International Women’s Day, the public are encouraged to place flowers on the graves of ‘Magdalene’s’ – so called fallen women, ‘unmarried mothers’ who were placed in laundries run by the church. I recently discovered that there had...
by Barbara | Apr 4, 2016 | Uncategorized
Every year thousands of Irish parents wave off their precious darlings as they indulge in what is now a kind of ‘rite of passage’ (and not a hugely useful one, in my opinion) – the 6th Year Holiday. Our teens travel in packs, descending like a flock of over...
by Barbara | Mar 31, 2016 | Uncategorized
Waking up on a spring morning to the news of a bomb in Brussels airport was a deeply unnerving experience. As I scanned up and down Twitter for more information I experienced that now familiar feeling of dread, sensing that this would not be the only attack on...
