Last
month Taoiseach Micheál Martin committed to addressing a spate of sexual
assaults against homeless people on the streets of Cork. The woman who secured
that commitment, Lavinia Kerwick, is someone who has already changed Ireland
for the better.
I’m humbled that
Lavinia Kerwick reads...
Whether he meant to or not, presidential candidate Peter Casey should not be forgiven for the racial hate he stirred up in the bloodpot of human hearts, writes Donal O’Keeffe.
A retired public servant said to me: “D’you know something, I’d...
Under the green gaze of John Mandeville, a red-faced man roars at a pregnant woman that she is a murderer.
In the Square in Mitchelstown, on the Sunday evening before the referendum vote, a middle-aged man exits a pub and...
Dr James Deeny defied Church and State in 1940s Ireland to temporarily close Cork’s Bessborough mother and baby home. The subsequent drop in the home’s infant mortality rate suggests Deeny’s intervention saved literally hundreds of children’s lives, writes Donal...
Former Garda Majella Moynihan – who says she is the only person in the world to be charged with giving birth - talks with Donal O’Keeffe about feeling pressured into giving up her baby, about the book she has...
“Emily Helena (indecipherable) Daughter. But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand.”
Another small gravestone still reads “Sacred to the memory of Jane, daughter of Edwd. and Maria Jennings, 39th Regt, who died Jan 31st 1869 aged 2.”, writes...
“They took my hair, they took my human rights, they took my clothes, they took my name, but they never took my spirit” - Mary Merritt
Mary Merritt was born in 1931 to a single mother in a Dublin workhouse....
I swore I wasn’t going to write about the Eighth Amendment this week. I wrote about the historical context of Ireland’s utterly dysfunctional attitude to women only two weeks ago and nobody wants to listen to a broken record.
No,...
This world can be a cruel and lonesome place sometimes, writes Donal O’Keeffe. Maybe there are worse things we might try than kindness now and then.
I’ve been thinking a bit about Bob Dylan’s granny lately.
Florence Sara Stone (nee Edelstein)...
November 1833. As the night skies explode in blazing light over America’s Deep South, the slavers on one plantation – terrified of the end of the world – attempt to make restitution to those they have enslaved.
Every year, in...