The Anti Room

As you may have read on Twitter or heard on the third Podcast, we’re doing a live version of the podcast as part of Banter  on October 24th with special guests Miriam O’Callaghan, Maeve Higgins and Martina Devlin. Admission is free, but you have to sign up in advance, so please do so here and [...]

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I stumbled into a quandary in my first year of Uni. I was sharing a house with three other students – all male – who suddenly upped and left because I was so impossible to live with they had found a bigger gaff they could share with their own friends. For some reason, I found [...]

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There’s been a lot of press recently about books that sell. Books that once sold by the trolleyful in supermarkets are now being left to rot on the shelves, apparently; stores that once offered a ’3 for 2′ promotion have scaled it down to ‘Buy one, get one half price’ (same mechanism, but less of [...]

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“I DON’T KNOW which of us is worse off,” said my aunt. She felt growing up that she had no choice but to marry and have children. “But I look at you and my girls and you have so many choices that it must be difficult to make one and not feel you are missing [...]

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Babies are dying in the Horn of Africa. Their pitiful faces, and the faces of their mothers are being beamed into our living rooms; they are on the Internet and they are in our newspapers. We are hearing about this new drought, which is bringing famine as an unwelcome visitor to millions of Africans. According to UNICEF, [...]

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When I moved to Dublin in 2007, it didn’t take me long to find Ryan Tubridy on my radio dial. What I hadn’t banked on was just how difficult it would be to avoid him everywhere else. To English friends, I used to describe Mr T , in terms of reach at least, as ‘like [...]

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Occasionally, my father wrote a note on a torn-off corner of newspaper and placed it onto the open page of the book I was reading. See you quietly, frequently at the end of the field, drinking this? (3, 2, 3)** Once I’d solved it, I’d earned what he was offering me. Five hundred and it [...]

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Four weeks ago today, as a sunny Sunday came to a close, I sat in the restaurant of a hotel in Clare. Perched on a clifftop, the view was of huge Atlantic waves crashing on the beach, the surfers long gone as the last light drained from the sky. My husband was putting our children [...]

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There’s a delightful video doing the rounds this last couple of weeks – a cover version of Chris Brown’s Look At Me Now by a band called Karmin, notable because Karmin singer Amy Heidemann does an amazing interpretation of bullet-rapping Busta Rhyme’s verses. I watched it, loved it, shared it with my friends. And as [...]

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A few weeks ago I met a delegation of Swedish journalists on a visit to Dublin. Fresh from a visit to the Irish Times offices, they remarked on the fact that there seemed to be very few women in the newsroom. They pointed out that in Sweden, men and women are so evenly distributed across [...]

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