Disappointing response to Dublin Rape Crisis 'We Consent' Ad - October, 2026 - The Irish Times (Published)
I was disappointed by the response of the Minister for Justice to the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre's We-Consent video, which he called "both inappropriate and demeaning" to grandparents, and which has now been withdrawn ("Advert showing grandparents hugging is taken down amid criticism", October 22nd). I can understand why some people had a knee-jerk reaction. Obviously grandparents love their grandchildren and want to show them affection but the video's message was simple — a child's body belongs to the child.
Many of us can remember receiving sloppy kisses from a family member at a family gathering, and the discomfort of knowing we had no choice in the matter. Too often, adults, grandparents included, assume love entitles them to a child's affection, but it doesn't.
As a parent of two small children, I have already been teaching my three-year-old that she has full autonomy over her body, and that other people have autonomy over theirs. She asks others "Do you need a hug?" and knows to say "I need space" if someone is encroaching on hers. Many parents are starting this early so that children understand they have control over their own bodies, and that if a grandparent asks "Can I have a hug?", it is okay to say no.
A grandparent who asks before hugging is not being demeaned, instead what they are doing is modelling respect. That early understanding becomes the foundation for everything children later learn about consent. It is a shame the DRCC felt it had to take the video down. I think this episode shows how far we still have to go as a country in understanding consent.
Divestment deadline looms for primary schools - October, 2026, The Irish Times (Published)
In two weeks, on October 31st, primary schools all over Ireland must inform the Department of Education whether they wish to act on the results of last winter’s Primary School Survey. More than 200,000 parents responded, and four in ten with children in denominational schools said they would prefer a multi-denominational one.
Schools were given a very short window to consult their communities meaningfully, and there is no way to know whether this is happening, because there is no requirement to report on whether or how consultation was carried out. Ultimately, the decision on whether a school changes patron rests with boards of management and patrons, whose deliberations are confidential.
Meanwhile, children opted out of religious instruction in Catholic schools, which make up 88 per cent of primary schools have no national guidance to uphold their constitutional rights not to participate in religious instruction. The Department committed a year ago to drawing up best-practice guidance, but in a reply to me this month, it said only that “work is ongoing,” and confirmed that arrangements remain “a matter for the school concerned.”
It looks to me that the State asked hundreds of thousands of parents what they wanted, then abdicated its responsibility for any real reform. Over the next two weeks, parents, journalists and public representatives should be asking every school, every patron and the Minister herself what their plan is for a meaningfully inclusive school system that upholds the rights of all children.
On public expressions of faith - September, 2026 - The Irish Times (Published)
I enjoyed Hugh Linehan's piece on faith in Irish, and I tend to agree that when people tell us what they believe, we should listen.
He asks why public professions of faith can provoke a kind of "cultural cringe" here. Perhaps it’s because in Ireland, we are still trying to work out just how much religion shapes our cultural identity. The Church's power has diminished (and rightly so in my view), but that doesn’t mean we are living in a post-Catholic country. How can we be when almost 90 per cent of primary schools remain under Catholic patronage? How do we explain the Angelus, which still rings out on the national broadcaster every day? Or GAA clubs, which are still organised around the parish? What do we tell ourselves when we see children of other faiths or none sidelined in their own classrooms? They may be included but they never fully belong. Even among my nominally Catholic millennial friends, we are still grappling with how religion was a central force in our upbringing, and how it still continues to shape our lives.
It also makes me wonder about our grandparents' faith. How much of it was genuine belief in God versus deference to an institution that ran their schools, their hospitals and much of their lives? Only in a truly secular society can we answer that question honestly, and perhaps then we would find it easier to make space for public expressions of all faiths and none.
Motherhood burden as a structural problem - September, 2026 - The Irish Times (Published)
As a mother working full-time with a one-year-old and a three-year-old, I read Fiona Ellis's piece ("Working mothers," September 23rd) with a lot of recognition and sympathy, and I'm grateful to her for writing with honesty and vulnerability. Her experience will be familiar to many readers. Too often, as women, we blame ourselves as individuals when we are working within a system that sets us up to fail.
Mothers here are entitled to 26 weeks of maternity leave; fathers get two weeks of paternity leave, paid at a flat rate many families can't afford to live on. The imbalance in parenting roles starts from day one, when the mother becomes the default parent, the one the GP, the crèche and everyone else calls, even, as my partner and I have learned, when the father is listed as the first contact.
And it doesn't stop there. There is no paid leave for when a child is sick, so those days fall to whoever earns less. Parents have only a right to request flexible or remote working, which employers can refuse, and crèche fees remain among the highest in Europe, with long waiting lists for places. The reality is when childcare costs almost a full salary, it is usually the mother who cuts her hours, which she pays for at retirement age with a smaller pension.
It doesn't have to be this way. In Iceland, each parent gets six months of well-paid leave, only six weeks of which can be transferred to the other. The upcoming Budget is a chance to begin closing the gap here with properly paid, longer paternity leave, paid leave for sick children, a real right to flexible work, and affordable, available childcare. Tackled together, these would lift much of the burden and mental load that mothers like us carry.
No wonder more women in this country don't go into politics - September, 2026 - Submitted to the Irish Times (unpublished)
In the space of a week, Holly Cairns's name appeared across three separate Irish Times pieces, including on the front page, over €8,500 in travel expenses she was mistakenly paid while on maternity leave. She noticed the error herself and repaid it in full.
It’s baffling to me that this story got so much coverage, and if there is any story here it’s surely that the Oireachtas expenses system has no category for maternity leave? TDs on leave must submit sick certificates to avoid being marked "absent," because an absence, for any reason (including having a baby apparently) triggers a financial penalty under the 120-day attendance rule. This blatant discrimination is worth reporting, not whether Ms Cairns personally profited from an error she reported herself.
It’d also hard not to notice the contrast with your recent editorial on politicians' safety (“The Irish Times view on politicians’ safety: a threat to democracy”, Sep 18th), which rightly warns that women in politics "bear the brunt" of hostility that drives them from public life. Coverage that puts a female politician's name alongside euro signs, three times in a week, sends a very clear message. Any wonder more women don't go into politics in this country?
Ireland needs a public education system, not a patronage model - August, 2026 - The Irish Times (Published)
I’m so grateful to Emer Nowlan and the many parents and volunteers who have fought tirelessly to create schools without a religious ethos (”Ireland’s approach to religious-run schools breaches many families’ constitutional rights”). For families who want an equality-based education, and for those fortunate enough to access them, Educate Together schools have been a lifeline.
But we really should be honest about the scale of what reconfiguration can actually deliver. It’s likely that only a handful of schools will ever change patronage. That won’t solve exclusion for the thousands of children who currently attend (or who will soon attend), their local Catholic school but are opted out from religious instruction.
The patronage system is an Irish solution to an Irish problem, and the result is a parallel education system that segregates children based on religious affiliation (or non affiliation). But there’s a simpler and more immediate step the Government could also take: move faith formation outside school hours in every denominational school (90% of all schools), so that children can opt out of religious instruction and not be set apart in their own classroom.
We don’t need a patronage model, what we need a public education system built for every child in it.
Challenging the manosphere and tradwive narratives - August, 2026 - The Irish Times (Published)
I welcome the Government's new campaign challenging manosphere and tradwife narratives ("'Tradwife' and 'manosphere' content's influence growing in Ireland, says National Women's Council," August 6th). But if we are serious about inoculating young people against the idea that a woman's place is in the home, we might start by taking a closer look at Irish society.
Let's take our primary schools for example. Some 88% operate under Catholic patronage -- an institution that is not exactly a beacon of gender equality: campaigning against divorce, contraception and abortion rights at every turn, and effectively still treats women as second class citizens. Perhaps the Government could simultaneously address this albatross, and remove the Catholic Church's grip on our schools.
Then there is the Constitution. In 2024, voters were asked whether to broaden the definition of "the Family" beyond marriage, and to strike out Article 41.2's language about a woman's "life within the home." Both proposals were resoundingly rejected, some by a two-to-one margin. The effect is that the capital-F Family in Irish law remains the married unit. For example, unmarried partners still face a less favourable position on inheritance and tax than their married counterparts, among other indignities.
And consider parental leave: 26 weeks of paid maternity leave against two weeks of paid paternity leave. Long before any algorithm reaches a teenager, we have already engineered this outcome, those months at home cement the mother as the de facto contact for the GP, the créche, the WhatsApp group. Small wonder so many women recognise something of their own lives in the trad-wife story.
Of course, none of this is the same as telling young girls their place is in the home as these trad wife influencers are doing. But when Irish society (in law and norms) still assumes the same nuclear, married household as their baseline, we should ask how different that baseline really is from the fantasy the trad-wife influencers are selling us.
Belle Burden's divorce memoir and the reality of marriage - June, 2026 - The Irish Times (Published)
Jennifer O’Connell’s piece on Belle Burden’s divorce memoir raises a question worth turning on its head: never mind whether the memoir tells the whole truth about a marriage, does *marriage* tell the whole truth about what it asks of women?
Women have good reason to be sceptical of the institution itself. The philosopher Clare Chambers has argued that marriage rewards only those who organise their lives in one particular and legally recognised way. Why should the state privilege this configuration above all others? The answer has historically had less to do with love than with property, inheritance, and the control of women’s bodies and labour.
Marriage has played a significant role in maintaining the wider regime of gender inequality, used to consolidate legal and economic oppression by confining women to a private sphere in which they remain disadvantaged. Perhaps no formulation captures this more sharply than that of feminist Sheila Cronan: “the marriage contract is the only important legal contract in which the terms are not listed.” Those unwritten terms? A full-time (unpaid) job: caring, cooking, cleaning. Not to mention the mental load of remembering, reminding, checking, and scheduling, that women, and mothers in particular, know all too well.
The practical disadvantages are not relics. Women who reduce hours or leave the workforce to raise children, and Irish women still do this at far higher rates than men, incur lasting earnings penalties, pension deficits, and financial dependency. The “marriage bonus” economists identify largely accrues to men; the marriage penalty falls on women. At the symbolic level, to refuse marriage is, for some, to invite suspicion or pity. None of this means individual marriages cannot be loving and freely chosen. But the institution is not reducible to its best instances.
It’s possible that Irish women are starting to understand this as almost one in five couples now cohabit. The marriage rate has fallen over 20% in a decade, to 3.8 per 1,000 in 2024, down from 4.8 in 2014. These are not the numbers of a society that enthusiastically endorses marriage, instead, they’re the numbers of a society voting with its feet.
Exemption from Irish is not the same as religious discrimination in school - April, 2026 - The Irish Times (Published)
I read Breda O’Brien’s piece (“Why are religious schools seen as divisive but Irish language schools are not?”) with some curiousity today.
She says “No one seriously suggests that someone with an exemption from Irish is being discriminated against or excluded by having to be around those who are studying it, or that the subject should be dropped entirely or taught after school.”
Breda neglects to mention that unlike religion, race or sexual orientation, being exempted from Irish at school is not grounds for discrimination under the Equal Status Act. Irish is a language, while faith formation is a subjective belief system. There is a profound difference between a student who is exempted from a subject and a student whose constitutional rights to freedom of religion and belief are violated on a daily basis.