The Anti Room

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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Long before most girls of the hetero-persuasion go on a date or become romantically involved, they’ve already encountered plenty of boyfriend material onscreen, from the Disney primer Prince Charming up to the modern day emo dudes in mumblecore. Hollywood and the culture at large often provide a disservice to women by asking us to swoon [...]

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Beyoncé by Alexi Lubomirski for Harper’s Bazaar In an interview in Harper’s Bazaar Beyoncé says feminism is natural to her and that it’s what she lives for and yet she doesn’t feel it’s necessary to define it. She thinks feminism needs a new name. “I need to find a catchy new word for feminism, right? [...]

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Type emigration into google and hit images… guess whose pictures come up en masse? Oh hell yeah, the Irish, a fantastic group of prematourists. We’re very good at it, and I for one am delighted to say Yes I can! This year’s Christmas card will feature  my good self  stood in front of a threadbare [...]

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One of the guests on the Sean Moncrieff radio show recently was an Irish woman living in Osaka, Japan. She spoke about the recent earthquake and tsunami, and how she was sufficiently moved to raise money for a charity to help the victims – the animal victims. In the wake of this devastating event, biblical [...]

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Voici five brilliant ideas I have had, ideas that I have sat around thinking about only to get up one day and realise that in the time it’s taken me to footle about letting a second cup of coffee cool to undrinkable, and reading old articles about cycling round Sicily, someone else has not only [...]

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Amongst the flurry of Kindle-this, ebook-that and the news that Harry Potter’s taking to the virtual world, it’s nice to sit down quietly with a cuppa and a well-thumbed tome and remember that it was recently Independent Booksellers’ Week. I’m not going to go into the reasons why we need independent bookshops, or even the [...]

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I’m all for positive discrimination when it’s merited and, let’s face it, it very often is. Having witnessed the progress of women in Irish politics being systematically thwarted over the decades I fully support the proposed introduction of candidate quotas – many of the most enlightened and progressive democracies in the world have used them [...]

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This is a small rant, or maybe it’s not really a rant but an appeal. I was at the recent National Women’s Council of Ireland meeting titled ‘Women in the Media, Not’ and it was generally brilliant. There was an initiative to encourage radio and television producers to air more women, including an innovative list [...]

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I’ve never been a huge fan of travelling. I can’t take people seriously when they talk about going away to ‘find themselves’ – I tend to want to point to them and go “Look, look, you’re right here! You don’t need to spend thousands of euros trekking across the desert or jungle, after all!” A [...]

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