Jennifer O'Connell

Taxpayers are being asked to pay for cosmetic surgery for a convicted criminal - but not for a new hand for this woman

2011-11-14T17:12:00.017Z

By Jennifer O’Connell

It was just after lunchtime on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in September 2009 when Alexandra Trotsenko was attacked.

She was alone in her Dublin apartment, and heard a knock on the door.

Opening it, she came face to face with a man standing in the sunlit hallway. He was wearing a balaclava, holding two huge knives to his chest, and asking about a woman called Joan.

“It looked to me like something unreal, something from a costume party. I thought it was a joke.”

She tried to slam the door closed, but he pushed her away. “Compared to his size, I’m like a kitten, so I can’t really resist,” she said.

What happened to Alexandra Trotsenko next is the stuff of horror movies.

The barbaric attack by James Kenny, who was jailed this month for 16 years, left her mutilated in a manner that almost defies description. “I can’t believe I survived after that,” she said.

There was so much blood in her face that she was unable to see for hours afterwards. She has permanent scarring on her face and the right side of her back and body, including a scar on her neck that is 11cm deep. She has lost the use of her right hand. She only has one full-length middle finger left; all the other fingers on that hand are stubs.

Two weeks ago, the Russian artist told RTE’s Liveline about the constant pain she has suffered since the attack by Kenny, who had previously served four years after viciously attacking two people during a break-in.

An operation to fit custom-made replacement prosthetic fingers are Alexandra Trotsenko’s only slight hope of returning to her career as an artist.

Such a procedure would cost “about €10,000”, she has been told. Unfortunately, she has no medical insurance or a medical card, and she is of the understanding that she is not entitled to have one fitted on the public health system.

Members of Ireland’s artistic community were so moved by her account that they got together to organise an auction to pay for her medical expenses, so she can have the procedure.

Meanwhile, on the same day that Alexandra told her story, with courage and a remarkable absence of self-pity, several newspapers carried a story about a man who had received free cosmetic surgery to repair a scar on his lip.

Like Alexandra, the man in his 30s.

Like Alexandra, he was at the zenith of his career when he was attacked.

Unlike Alexandra, his career was one which had done nothing to enrich the lives of others.

Click on the link below to read on

He is a convicted criminal who is serving a life sentence in Portlaoise prison for murder. He had been known to the police since his teens, and is regarded as the leader of one of the Republic’s most violent drugs gangs.

Unlike Alexandra, he was entitled, without question, to all his treatment for free, paid for by the taxpayer.

He was taken from his cell, and brought to Dublin in the company of a prison office and an army escort, where had several consultations and eventually surgery last spring.

According to the reports, surgery can be performed and paid for by the State, “if facial scarring is causing low self esteem. It can also be carried out if there are problems of tightness around the scarring.”

In the wake of the outcry over the reports, prison officers insisted it was “normal practice” to refer inmates with wounds to the face or neck to a plastic surgeon. The Prison Service said inmates were entitled to “the same standard of healthcare as members of the public who held a medical card.”

The HSE will cover surgical prosthetic procedures for medical card holders on the recommendation of their doctors.

However, Alexandra doesn’t have a medical card. Nor does she have private health insurance.

Now, she believes her last hope of being able to pay for the prosthesis that will give her some prospect of a return to normal life is the fundraising drive launched by her fellow artists and Liveline.

Normally, it’s a meaningless rhetorical practice to juxtapose two opposing realities in order to make a point about the unfairness of society.

When you ask, for example, why Anglo bondholders should be repaid €70 billion when funding for special needs assistants in schools has been withdrawn, you’re ignoring the unfortunate fact that less than half of the current budget deficit of €22.2 billion is due to the bank bailouts.

Of course, it seems unthinkable that we can find the money for one but not the other, but the reality is that our spending was out of control – and even if the banking crash had never happened, funding for special needs assistants may still have been cut.

But in this case, there is no false dichotomy.

The public health service, which is funded by taxpayers, covered the cost of the treatment of a scar on the lip of a convicted criminal.

The same health service has so far not agreed to pay for prosthetic surgery for a talented artist, who was left horribly disfigured and unable to work.

However, there may be a glimmer of hope for Alexandra in a statement issued last week by the HSE, in the aftermath of the Liveline programme.

The statement said public patients were entitled to treatment “up to and including an orthotic device, which are available in a number of public hospitals”.

“Decisions about treatment are based on a clinical assessment and the decision to recommend such a treatment is made by a patient’s own consultant medical team,” it continued.

I looked on the website of the Health Service Executive last week to see if I could find its mission statement. I couldn’t, but presumably if there was a mission statement, it would say something about compassion and equity of care.

But there’s no compassion or equity of care in a system that appears to value the ‘self-esteem’ of a convicted murderer over the right of the blameless victim of a sadistic attack to have prosthetic surgery on her hand.

Even if there’s the slightest hope the surgery will improve life for Alexandra, we owe it to her – and to ourselves – to try.

Viewing of ART FOR ALEXANDRA is taking place on Sunday 27 November from 9am – 12 midday. Auction commences at 1pm in Adam’s Auctioneers Valuers in Blackrock, Co Dublin. www.rte.ie/radio1/liveline and www.adamsblackrock.com

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on November 13, 2011

You want to know the secret of eternal youth? Call your siblings

2011-11-12T16:50:00.013Z

By Jennifer O’Connell

If you really want to know the secret of eternal youth, ask your siblings round.

There’s no quicker or more effective way to recapture the flush of youth than a few hours spent in the company of those who shared it, thrashing out such important issues as who ate the last strawberry Quality Street, or which one of you broke the leg off the Millennium Falcon during the treacherous Christmas of 1982.

No matter what age you are, how many adult responsibilities you’ve accumulated, or what you’ve else accomplished in life, you can always count on your siblings to reduce you in an instant to that teary, foot-stamping ten-year-old, whose Tiny Tears has just had her hair washed in the loo.

Image by Fotopedia on Flickr

Just ask 38-year-old James Murdoch. The current issue of Vanity Fair reveals that, during this summer’s phone hacking crisis, his sister Elisabeth took father Rupert aside and advised him to persuade James to step down as the chairman of News Corp, which owns Sky and the Times newspaper group.

Elisabeth may have quit her role in News Corp some ten year previously, but – unhappily for James - her position as his big sister is a lifelong one, and comes with attendant meddling rights.

Rupert did indeed consider firing his son, who has always been regarded as the brightest and best of the Murdoch progeny (a state of play which may not, a cynic could suggest, have been entirely unrelated to Elisabeth’s intervention.) After a sleepless night, the family patriarch decided against it. Still, you can be sure Elisabeth and James will have more than just the remote control to squabble about this Christmas.

Is it any wonder that recent studies have turned the old wisdom about only children on its head, revealing that the sibling-free make for the happiest children and adults?

Click on the link below to read on

In one study, which was carried out by the Institute for Social and Economic Research in Britain, half of the children 2,500 children surveyed said they had been bullied by a sibling, and one in three said they had been hit, kicked or pushed on regular occasions. Others complained of name-calling and having their belongings stolen.

Dana Rosemary Scallon knows all about feeling bruised (metaphorically of course) by your siblings, after she and her sister Susan Stein fell out spectacularly over control of her royalties - a row which ended up in a US court five years ago.

During the court case, allegations of sexual abuse were made against Dana’s brother and campaign manager, John Brown – and these allegations again resurfaced during the race for the presidency. Now it appears that Dana’s niece, Susan Gorrell – who made the complaints – is planning to sue her aunt personally and Gorrell’s mother, Susan Stein, insists she has "no personal relationship whatsoever" with her younger sister Dana. As family disputes go, it’s hard to imagine one less likely to be resolved any time soon.

But big families aren’t all bad news. As Nancy Mitford – herself one of seven, who fell prey to bitter rivalries - once said, the best thing about being born into one is that you get an early lesson in life’s essential unfairness.

That can be a useful preparation for life, especially a life in politics – and never more so than if you’re David Miliband.

The elder by four years, and better-looking by some distance, of the two Miliband brothers, David was the one who had everything going for him.

He got a first in his degree, while little brother Ed only made a 2.1. He did his postgraduate studies at the flash MIT in the US, while Ed had to make do with Bertie Ahern’s alma mater, the London School of Economics. In Gordon Brown’s cabinet, David was appointed Foreign Secretary, while Ed got the less prestigious Cabinet Office.

But all that changed in September last year, when Ed pipped David to the position of Labour leader.

These days, the brothers are all public declarations of love, and simmering resentment. During Ed’s first speech as Labour leader, David declined to clap. The final childhood score was settled when Ed got married this summer – and elected not to have a best man.

But there’s something about the Irish which dictates that when we fall out with our families, we fall fast and furiously.

When Ben Dunne was caught in a Florida hotel room in 1992 with a prostitute and a quantity of cocaine, it was the last blow for his sister, Margaret Heffernan, described in media reports at the time as a strict Catholic who "disapproves of any kind of over indulgence".

He later said that her subsequent bid to oust him as joint managing director of the family firm was “one of the great favours” she had done for him, because it forced him to get clean. But remarks he made just three years ago suggested that, even now it’s not all sweetness and light between them: “She’s 66 years of age…If I was in the retail business I would say I was past my sell-by date. I think Margaret may be getting past it.”

As Dunne’s capacity to twist the knife twenty years on demonstrates, family quarrels are unrivalled by any other in their capacity to endure – as well as to infuriate, to hurt, to shame and to humiliate.

But what really elevates them above all other types of feud is the way they always end up back where they began.

And inevitably, that’s with the question of who has more. Whether it’s more of Mummy and Daddy’s attention, more toys, more A-grades or more power, money and respect may vary with age and circumstance, but the thrust of them never really changes.

And yet, for all that, family feuds also offer a kind of thrill of aesthetic distance – the same kind of frisson you feel when you terrify the life out of yourself on a rollercoaster ride and know that when it ends, you’ll find yourself safely back on earth.

There is, as the American journalist Mignon McLaughlin wrote in The Neurotic’s Notebook, in every family row a “tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.”

And in the end – forget the billion dollar media empire or the broken Millennium Falcon – because that’s what family’s all about.

Besides, if not with your siblings, then who else will you ever get to engage in such passionate discourse about the optimum flavour in a tin of Quality Street?

Don’t even try telling me it’s not strawberry.

This column first appeared in the Irish Independent Weekend magazine on November 12, 2011

The children who say they should never have been born making legal history in Israel

2011-11-06T17:02:00.000Z

By Jennifer O’Connell

They are the children who believe they should never have been born – and they are going to court to prove it.

In Israel, a growing number of children have taken legal action against the doctors who helped give them life, claiming that they should have been terminated as foetuses in the womb.

If you think the ‘right to life’ debate is an ethical minefield, then welcome to the ‘right to no life’ debate.

Wrongful life cases, as they are called, are similar to cases of wrongful birth – such as the one taken in California last month, in which the parents of a boy born with one arm and no legs successfully sued the medics who failed to diagnose his condition for $4.5 million – but for one, crucial difference.

Image by fotopedia.com

Cases of wrongful birth are normally taken by the parents. But cases of wrongful life, which are only permitted in four US States, and have been specifically ruled against in Germany, the UK and Australia, are typically taken by the affected individuals themselves, putting them in the unique and shocking position of being the children who sue for being born.

Some ethicists argue that ‘wrongful life’ cases are less psychologically damaging to the child. "I find it very difficult to understand how parents can go on the witness stand and tell their children 'it would have better for you not to have been born'," Rabbi Avraham Steinberg, a medical ethicist from the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem, recently told New Scientist magazine.

"What are the psychological effects on the children?"

But what are effects on a child who stands up in court – metaphorically, or in some cases, literally – to say they wish they had never been born?

Click on the link below to read on

The Israeli government intends to find out. Following 600 such cases there in the last 24 years, and many more cases of ‘wrongful birth’, it has launched an investigation into their validity – an investigation that’s throwing up some uncomfortable questions about the culture of endless reproductive choice.

There are a number of circumstances peculiar to Israel that have contributed to the spate of cases there. The first is high rates of consanguinity – marriage between cousins, which in some communities is as high as 67 per cent – and has in turn led to a high rate of genetic abnormalities.

Then there are abortion laws that rank among the most liberal in the world, and Israel’s culture of what doctors are calling the “quest for the perfect baby" - which has been fuelled by the pro-science outlook, and the widespread use of genetic testing. As Israeli professor of medicine, Meir Brezis, put it last month: “An illusion has developed in Israel that it is possible to ensure a perfect baby by means of extensive testing during the course of the pregnancy.”

And thus, in Israel, more pregnancy scans are performed than in most other Western countries.

In utero screening represents a major advance in maternal and foetal wellbeing. But like most significant scientific advances, it has also opened up an ethical minefield.

Most of the time, parents simply use it to arm themselves with knowledge of any difficulties their child might have during pregnancy after birth. Occasionally, the foetus is found to be at risk of a level of disability that they feel exceeds their capacity to cope, or that will make the baby’s life untenable. In those cases, the parents might choose to terminate, though this is not an option available in Irish law.

In Israel, however, parents can make the decision to have an abortion at any stage, so long as they have the approval of an abortion commission. Abortions can be carried out on foetuses with a mild defect up to week 24; babies with a ‘moderate abnormality’ can be aborted up to week 28, and babies with a severe impairment that will require lifelong assistance can be aborted right up to the very end.

The spate of ‘wrongful life’ cases is an inevitable by-product of this culture of limitless choice: the children taking the cases claims their parents would have terminated them if their conditions had been properly diagnosed in utero.

In general, I believe in choice. My personal view has always been in favour of both euthanasia and abortion in certain circumstances. I mostly support a couple’s right to do whatever needs to be done to achieve pregnancy – whether that’s IVF, surrogacy, egg or sperm donation.

But choice cannot be limitless – and the choices of individuals are not made in a vacuum.

As the professor of medicine at Hadassah University Hospital, Meir Brezis, said when giving evidence at an Israeli Supreme Court public committee on the topic of wrongful birth cases: “[It’s] encouraging the perception of the disabled as people whose existence should have been prevented.”

According to a lawyer quoted in New Scientist, the typical payout for someone with spina bifida or cystic fibrosis who successfully takes a wrongful life case is 4.5 million shekels, or around €900,000.

What kind of message does that send to all the people leading full, happy existences, in spite of these conditions?

As Israeli courts effectively give credence to the claim by some people with these conditions that they should never have been born, it doesn’t seem such a far cry from the Nazi-era programmes of enforced sterilization that were aimed at wiping out all forms of “life unworthy of life”.

Professor Arie Herman, president of the Israel Society of Gynecology and Obstetrics, touched on this earlier in the year, when he summed up the situation facing doctors in his country: “If we are a society that wants perfect children and everything else is wrongful birth, what does that say about our attitude to the disabled? That they basically don't need to be here, that they should have been destroyed first.”

He went on to say: “The question is an ethical one: Who is not welcome in the world?”

That’s a question that has echoes of a much darker time in Jewish history.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on November 6, 2011

The Bo'Gas Energy Theatre has a nice ring

2011-11-05T16:46:00.006Z

By Jennifer O’Connell

It’s the international performers I feel most sorry for. Just imagine The Carpenters’ little faces when they hear they’ll be playing their long-awaited Dublin gig at the ‘Bored Gosh Energy’ Theatre.

If corporate sponsorship deals are supposed to alienate, irritate and/or perplex the corporation-in-question’s customer base, then Bord Gais Energy’s recent deal involving the renaming of the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin is €700,000 a year well spent.

But if that’s not the general idea, then it’s hard to know what the hell the energy company was thinking.

The Bord Gais Energy Theatre, which is how the theatre in Dublin’s Ringsend shall henceforth be known, is not a name that trips off the tongue at the best of times.

In the current environment you might say that it sticks squarely in the craw.

On the very same day that the deal was announced, figures revealed that 400,000 people have now fallen behind in their energy bills. It came just weeks after Bord Gais whacked a 22 per cent price hike onto its gas customers.

And that wasn’t the only surprise for Bord Gais customers this autumn: the company has also raised its prices for its 435,000 electricity customers by 12 per cent. That’s an extra €144 on the average annual bill.

In the meantime, the energy provider has been splashing out on the decoration of its plush new premises in Dublin, spending up to €300,000 on 380 new designer office chairs.

At least there was a rationale for the chairs: you knew Bord Gais employees were sitting comfortably when they rang to tell you they’d be disconnecting you from your power supply because you couldn’t afford to pay the bill.

But there’s no such rationale that I can see for the renaming of the theatre – or, for that matter, for this kind of corporate rebranding in general.

Click on the link below to read on >

What was Aviva thinking, for instance, when it signed a €40 million deal to change the 137-year-old name of the Lansdowne Road stadium?

It certainly wasn’t thinking of the one thousand employees whose jobs it would cut just two short years later.

We can’t do much about the Aviva job losses now, but at least we’re free to go back to calling the stadium Lansdowne Road now – especially has Aviva has signaled that it no longer much cares what the pampered Irish population thinks.

Shortly before the redundancies were announced, Aviva boss Andrew went on US television to criticize the “culture of entitlement” in Ireland. (Moss, in entirely unrelated news, is on a pay packet of €2.8 million, while the average Aviva workers in Ireland earned €35,000.)

But while the new name of the Lansdowne Road stadium did confound the cynics by actually catching on, it’s hard to see the Grand Canal Theatre’s new identity taking off in quite the same way.

I doubt even Bord Gáis’s eager promise to offer priority bookings and discounted tickets to its customers (or at least to the percentage of them who aren’t so strapped for cash they’re no longer even able to heat their own house) will be enough to help people wrap their tongues around the theatre’s awkward new name.

Ostensibly, the idea behind the expensive rebranding deal – which is estimated to be costing Bord Gais €700,000 a year for each of the next six years - is that it will help to lure back customers who’ve been defecting to rival energy providers.

I may be missing something, but I’d have thought that there’s a much easier way to win back business, a strategy so simple it can be summed up in three words. Cut your prices.

But no, Bord Gais was determined to be more creative than that. In fact, it was so anxious to avoid the obvious route that it attempted to raise gas prices up by an eye-watering 39 per cent this summer. When this didn’t get the approval of the energy regulator, it settled for a hike of 22 per cent, alongside the 12 per cent increase for electricity customers.

You have to wonder what Bord Gáis Energy imagines all this is doing for its image.

Does it really think that people who like going to the theatre will be so impressed by the experience, they’ll immediately march home and ‘make the big switch’, regardless of price considerations?

Does it fancy existing customers will be so blown away by the chance of a 15 per cent discount on, say, tickets to The Snowman Christmas Special with Nicky Byrne, or a night with Psychic Sally Morgan, that they’ll feel better about forking out an extra €151 on the average annual gas bill of €689?

Of course it doesn’t. That’s not what such sponsorship deals are about.

Rather, the renaming of the theatre is supposed to puff up a cloud of positive publicity that we won’t notice all the not-so-nice nice things it’s doing – such leaving around 60 families a week to freeze during the cold winter months because they can no longer pay their bills.

It’s the same mentality which means the ESB sees no contradiction in pursuing a legal action that sends a 65-year-old woman to jail for 23 nights in a row over trees, while bestowing its largesse over everything from guide dogs to women’s hockey and the feis ceol.

The good news is that, given the knack of Dubliners for imaginative naming of public amenities, it can’t be too long before the Bord Gais Energy Theatre sheds its clumsy new moniker in favour of something snappier.

Some observers have suggested it’ll be known as the Beget Theatre, which alludes to one popular way to round off an evening at the theatre. Those with upwardly mobile aspirations might find themselves referring to it as the Baguette. Meanwhile, a columnist for another newspaper has put his spoke in for the Gastropod.

But of all the possible options, I think the Bo’Gas Theatre has the best ring.

Despite all the progress, Ireland is still no lavender-scented utopia in which to be gay

2011-10-31T12:28:00.005Z

By Jennifer O'Connell

Everybody liked Stuart. They always say that after somebody dies tragically, but this time it appears to have been true. His friends called him a ‘‘classical comedian’’, ‘‘a big softy’’, ‘‘the life and soul’’. They said that he knew everybody in the town where he lived.

The night he died began like any other. He was 28 years old. He had just started a new job, working in a bar. It was his grandmother’s 80th birthday party, but Stuart was running late after he decided to go to another party first. By all accounts, Stuart loved parties.

His friends last saw him outside a fire station at 2.30 in the morning. He never made it to his grandmother’s do.

By 5am he was dead. His body was discovered on an industrial estate in the town where he had spent most of his life, tied to a lamppost. He had been brutally beaten and burned to death.

Once reports of the gruesome, medieval manner of his killing began to circulate last week, observers wondered what had happened to bring such a happy, likeable man to such a horrific end.

Almost immediately, speculation began to focus on his sexuality. Stuart, they said, must have been murdered and burned at the stake because he was gay.

But the killing of Stuart Walker didn’t take place in Uganda, Sierra Leone or Saudi Arabia. It happened in a very ordinary town called Cumnock in Ayrshire, Scotland.

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Strathclyde police, who are investigating the murder, have not said whether they believe he was targeted because of his homosexuality, except to state that they are investigating ‘‘all aspects of the victim’s life’’.

The news of his death last weekend came on the same day that it was reported that hate crimes against gay and transgender people increased fivefold in Scotland over the past five years. There were 666 crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people recorded in Scotland in 2009/10 - almost double the 365 reported in 2007/08.

In a survey conducted in 2010, one in three LGBT people in Scotland said they’d been attacked.

Observers in Britain attribute the increase to three things: better reporting of attacks, the growth in the number of religions which are intolerant of homosexuality and the higher visibility of gay and transgender people which, sadly, has contributed to making them more vulnerable to attack.

It is a particularly tragic irony that the very freedoms which they have won are now putting gay people at greater risk.

As Ireland undergoes similar kinds of social transformation, albeit at a much slower pace, there is no room for complacency here.

We have come a long way in the acceptance of gay rights. It’s hard to believe now that homosexuality was only decriminalised 18 years ago, and that it’s a mere 21 years since the WHO stopped classifying it as a ‘health problem’.

Since earlier this year, gay people can now have their relationships recognised in law. Throughout 2011, my Facebook feed has regularly turned pink with the news of the impending nuptials of another gay couple.

Progress is also being made elsewhere. Homophobic bullying in schools is being tackled through initiatives spearheaded by organisations such as BeLongTo and the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network (Glen). Earlier this year, the Department of Education issued guidelines on dealing with gay bullying, and Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn pledged to make schools ‘‘safe and supportive’’ for all students. Two years ago, the first conference of gay teachers was held in Ireland.

However, let’s not get carried away on the warm and fuzzy tide of our own compassion and acceptance. It would be wrong to give the impression that Ireland is some kind of lavender-scented utopia in which to be gay. Attacks of the kind that happened to Stuart Walker are almost unheard of - unfortunately, less serious assaults are not.

Last summer, a prominent Irish journalist was reported to have been beaten in a homophobic attack in Dublin city centre. Earlier in the year, TV presenter Brendan Courtney turned up at the Ifta awards with a black eye, after he was punched in the face while on a night out with friends, in what he categorised as a homophobic attack. In fact, many of the gay people I know have been subjected to similar, random incidents of unprovoked low-level violence.

And it starts even before they are old enough to be attacked on the streets.

It starts in the playground. Irish teachers report that children as young as seven and eight are using words like ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ as insults, without understanding what the terms mean; that almost all teenage bullying involves the invocation of the words ‘gay’ or ‘faggot’.

In the language of the playground, the word ‘gay’ has come to act as a shorthand for anything bad.

Teachers are ‘uncomfortable’ confronting the issue, a seminar held last summer on the issue was told. And it’s not just the teachers. In a study last year, 70 per cent of Irish parents said their children were under pressure ‘‘not to be gay’’.

And while equality legislation exists as a safeguard, teachers, doctors, nurses and anyone employed by a religious-owned school or hospital can still be lawfully discriminated against if their sexual orientation is deemed to create a risk of ‘‘undermining the religious ethos of the institution’’.

If it serves no other purpose, the barbaric and senseless death of Stuart Walker should remind us how far we still have to go in the pursuit of a society in which people are free to live as they choose.

Even as you read this, a child somewhere is dreading whatever awaits them in the playground tomorrow.

This article first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on October 30, 2011

When a man doesn't want children, we assume it's because he's having too much fun. When a woman doesn't want children, we think she's an aberration

2011-10-30T12:36:00.004Z

By Jennifer O’Connell

Did you read that recent article about poor, childless George Clooney? No, of course you didn’t.

The words “poor” and “childless” simply don’t belong in the same sentence as the name George Clooney.

I thought about this as I read the latest baby rumours concerning ‘tragic, childless’ Jennifer Aniston. (Rumours which are totally true this time, except for the part where she is not pregnant.)

I may be missing the point here, but Aniston strikes me as anything but tragic.

She has a career she loves, and which has made her disgustingly wealthy; a $42 million home in Beverly Hills and an apartment in New York; hair and a body to die for; an apparently close circle of female friends, and a string of eligible male consorts. She seems to spend roughly the same portion of her life frolicking on a beach in Mexico as most other women her age spend standing at the school gates in the rain.

Yet, no profile or interview with her is complete without an unflattering comparison to the fertile-as-the-Nile-Delta Angie, or a reference to her ‘longing’ for children.

At least once a year, Aniston’s PR people feel compelled to issue a statement along the lines of this one, from last February: “Jennifer is not adopting a baby from Mexico, nor does she have a nursery in her home and she has not hired a nanny.”

And yet, we still simply refuse to believe it, as though we can’t come to terms with the idea that a woman of 42, with so much else going for her, might simply choose not to raise a child.

Society and popular culture has always fetishised motherhood. From the Virgin Madonna right up to Michelle Obama, with several rom coms in between, motherhood is seen as the ultimate happy ending; the most natural expression of what it means to be a woman. Newspapers are full of warnings about ‘not leaving it too late’ to embrace your destiny, and heart-wrenching parables about Kylie’s or Jen’s ‘baby agony’ to illustrate the point.

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It is ironic that the pressure to procreate has never been more intense, at the precise moment when large numbers of women are opting not to.

The latest CSO figures reveal that there are growing numbers of people – some of them sane, well-intentioned, compassionate, successful, selfless and even, dare I say it, perfectly normal – who are in their 30s or 40s and have no children.

More than one in six Irish women now have no children at the age of 45. The statistics also show that the higher a woman’s educational attainment, the later she will start having children – and the fewer children she will have.

This echoes a trend being seen right across Europe, where the birthrate is in steep decline. A major study in American estimates that one in five women will never have a biological child.

Some of this is involuntary: for various biological, sexual and social reasons, there are people who are deprived of the opportunity to become parents. But for a growing number, being childfree is a state they have chosen; a state they value and work hard to maintain.

If a man says he doesn’t want children, we assume – usually rightly - that it’s because he’s having too much of a good time. We look on them indulgently – even men like the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, who cheerfully described himself as a “horrible mistake by Darwinian standards” because he has no desire to reproduce.

But a woman who says she doesn’t want children is expected to offer a better explanation – an explanation that she can expect to be met with suspicion, incredulity, condescension, or even pity.

The actress Cameron Diaz, who is 37, has been vocal about her ambiguity on the subject. “Children aren't the only things that bring you gratification and happiness, and it's easier to give life than to give love, so I don't know. That kind of change would have to be either very well thought out, or a total mistake,” she has said.

The typical response to this is to insist that she’ll change her mind – or worse, that she’ll regret it.

In her final interview with Marian Finucane, the late Nuala O’Faolain was utterly candid in her despair at facing up to her imminent death. But what struck me most was the way she talked about being relieved, in what were her final weeks of life, she had decided not to have children.

If O’Faolain was ever to regret her childfree state, she might have been expected to do so then. But she didn’t.

Likewise, Helen Mirren, Lionel Shriver and Oprah are all at an age where – popular wisdom has it – women who ‘selfishly’ decided not to have children when they were younger end up rueing their foolishness.

But none of them looks to me to be burning up with regret about all the babies they didn’t have.

In the main, though, female role models for the happily childfree remain few and far between – and is it any wonder? Stating a desire not to have children – or even admitting to feeling unsure about the prospect – is, in this parentcentric society, the ultimate taboo.

It’s hard to understand why this is. Deciding to shoulder responsibility for the health, happiness, emotional development, and general care of someone who interrupts your sleep, spends all your money and addresses you mostly as “Can I have...” clearly isn’t going to be for everyone.

If it’s for you, then I salute you. I can’t put into words how much pleasure my children have brought me, and I’ve no intention of boring you by trying.

Happy as I am with my choice, though, I’m not about to start trying to convert every passing, unencumbered thirty- or fortysomething woman to the cause. It’s not as though there aren’t enough of us already.

But – and there’s no easy way to say this - I can’t help feeling that the ‘childfree by choice’ are at least part to blame for some of the negativity and incomprehension directed towards them.

In internet chat forums and magazine articles, they throw around terms like ‘breeders’ and ‘crotch-fruit’; they carp about Bugaboo-pushing mothers running them off the pavement; they make the rest of us feel self-conscious and boring with their stories about holidays in Zanzibar, and their frozen smiles when the subject of children comes up.

A little bit more understanding on both sides probably wouldn’t go astray.

The reality is that - like marriage or civil union; like renting or buying; like driving a car or riding a bike - being child-free or deciding to have children are merely different life choices. One is not more valid or more worthwhile than the other.

In the meantime, let’s all keep our fingers crossed for that poor, childless Simon Cowell.

This column first appeared in the Irish Independent Weekend magazine on Saturday, October 29, 2011

We used to think the madness of the building boom was about overpriced homes in the middle of nowhere. Now we know it's a matter of life and death

2011-10-24T12:02:00.000+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

He noticed the smell as soon as he started to climb the stairs. Smoke.

A fire alarm was ringing in the distance, but otherwise, everything in the block was quiet.

‘Sam’ (he would prefer his real name is not used) took the stairs, two at a time, as he always did. When he got to the door of his apartment on the third floor, he felt the heat radiating through the woodwork.

His self-preservation instinct temporarily failed him, and he put his key in the lock, and pushed open the door. He faced a wall of smoke.

When I came to help Sam stuff his few surviving possessions into plastic bags, the fire officer who attended the scene told me that he was extremely lucky to have walked away uninjured.

But nothing much else survived: the apartment was a blackened shell. Whatever hadn’t been melted in the heat, was destroyed when the fire brigade broke in and doused the flames.

The fire seemed to have started spontaneously that morning in the electric shower, which had been installed when the apartment was originally built in the early 1990s.

The unit came away from the wall and fell into the bath, where it smoldered all day in the empty apartment.

It was the classic accident waiting to happen.

The internal walls were sufficiently insulated to prevent the entire building becoming an inferno – but that’s about all the developers and the management company got right in the apartment block, which is typical of those that sprang up around Dublin at that time.

There were fire extinguishers in the apartment itself, but none in the common areas. The hall of the apartment block had a fire alarm, but it didn’t go off. There were no routes out of the building except through the main door.

Photo by sun dazed on Flickr

When the fire brigade arrived, they weren’t able to get in the electronic main gate. They had to ring every bell in the building until they found someone who opened it to let them in.

It took Sam a long time to piece his life back together after the fire, which happened two years ago this month – but he knows he’s lucky to have a life to piece back together.

He said then that he thought it couldn’t be the only apartment block in the city that was vulnerable. It turns out he was right.

Had a similar fire broken out in the Priory Hall apartment building in Donaghmede at any stage up to last week, it’s unlikely there would have been any such happy ending.

Click on link below to read on >

Earlier this month, fire safety officers revealed in the High Court how they had been “horrified” by what they’d found when they first inspected the building, which had been completed two years previously, in 2008. They described how a fire that started in one of the apartments and got into the external cavity wall could extend very quickly to the entire complex without any control or barrier.

As a result of their report, three fire safety notices were served on the developers in September 2009, but just some of the required works agreed were done. At that stage, Dublin city council got worried enough to move its own tenants out.

But it wasn’t until last week that efforts were made to move the last 249 residents out of the 140 privately-owned apartments Priory Hall to safety.

In a way, they’re the lucky ones.

How many other apartment owners are living in similar firetraps with no idea that they’re just one faulty-shower-in-an-apartment-down-the-hall away from disaster?

The answer, of course, is that we don’t know.

Fire safety certificates are issued to developers on the basis of the architectural plans for a building, in advance of building work beginning.

After that, it’s up to the builder whether or not he chooses to comply with the regulations – or whether he’ll shove empty cement sacks into the cavities instead of fireproof materials.

Once the building is complete, local councils have the right to carry out inspections. And that’s as far as their obligations go.

The tribunals demonstrated just how badly Ireland’s planning system had been damaged by incompetence, greed, and chicanery. Now we’re finally seeing the human faces of the hubris and stupidity of the boom years.

They’re the faces of the 249 people who have been told they must leave Priory Hall, even though many of them will go on having to pay a mortgage on the homes they can no longer live in.

They’re the faces of the 60,000 families living in homes contaminated by pyrite, who have been informed that Homebond will not compensate them for the estimated €70,000 repair costs - and that the state regards the issue as a ‘civil matter’.

They’re also the faces of the tens of thousands of residents locked in ongoing battles with their management companies; the 40,000 families who have fallen six months or more into arrears on their mortgage; the hundreds of thousands stuck in negative equity with no real prospect of getting out of it.

But thanks to the Priory Hall fiasco, we’ve entered a frightening new chapter in the history of the legacy of the boom.

For years, discussions about Ireland’s shambolic approach to building regulations and planning have focused on the shopping centres which sprang up in the middle of nowhere; the poorly-finished estates which are not serviced by public transport; the once-pretty seaside villages now blighted by ugly houses; the shoebox apartments that you couldn’t swing a wok - let alone raise a family - in.

In the future, we will look back on those discussions with nostalgia. Because from now on, when we talk about the legacy of Ireland’s planning shambles, we’ll have to talk about it in terms of life and death.

If another Stardust happens, we can no longer claim we never saw it coming.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on October 23, 2011

Hooked on addiction

2011-10-24T11:53:00.000+01:00

Food Addiction Much Like Drug Addiction, Say Scientists.

Kicking Your Internet Addiction. Psychologist Warns Fans of Football Addiction. Your Addiction To Wheat Products Is Making You Fat. Coffee Addiction Is In Your Genes. Are You Suffering From FAD – Facebook Addiction Disorder? Drug and Sex Addiction: Why Addicts Throw Their Good Lives Away. Can A Doughnut Be A Drug? Toddler Addicted to Eating Munches Through A Lightbulb.

We are a society addicted to addiction. Alcohol. Food. Caffeine. Sugar. Wheat. Sex. Shopping. Work. The internet. Porn. Love. Gambling. Head Shops. Exercise. Self-harm. Smartphones. Drugs. Over-the counter painkillers. Facebook. Football. The Wii.

It’s almost impossible to open a newspaper or turn on the internet with encountering a story on some new form of addiction.

In fact, think of virtually any pleasurable way to pass a few hours (and quite a few that aren’t remotely pleasurable) and you can be sure that someone, somewhere is deciding they’re addicted to it - and someone else is writing an article about it.

Photo by aftab. on Flickr

Research published in the Guardian newspaper in 2001 found that in 1990, newspapers in Britain had just 428 stories featuring the terms ‘addict’, ‘addicts’ or ‘addiction’; by the year 2000, this figure had risen dramatically to 11,707.

Put those same search terms into Google News today, and you’ll come up with an astonishing 39,000 articles from the last year alone.

Meanwhile, barely a day passes without some celebrity talking candidly about their addiction. Whether it’s Chris Evans declaring he has stopped drinking after a night out with Prince Harry; Sarah Jessica Parker bemoaning her addiction to nicotine, or Charlie Sheen talking openly about his experiences with porn stars and drugs, they seem to be lining up to out themselves as addicts.

Addiction is our new obsession.

But how much do we really understand about it? And are we guilty of simply pathologising every antisocial habit and passing compulsion?

In its true form, addiction is a formidable enemy – it can deeply and completely take over the brain, hijacking memory-making processes, exploiting emotions, and indiscriminately destroying lives.

Historically, the definition of addiction was straightforward: it was understood to be a physical and psychological dependence on psychoactive substances that were capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier.

Click link below to read on >

For certain addictions - alcohol, drugs, nicotine and even caffeine - that definition still works fine. After all, they have an external pharmacology that acts on our nervous system. The damaging effects of long term use are widely documented; the impact of withdrawal undeniable.

But this definition doesn’t account for all the other newer and more inventive ways we have found to wreak havoc on our own lives, and those of everyone around us.

Psychiatrists such as Dr Colin O’Gara of the St John of God hospital in Dublin point out that an addiction to overeating or gambling can have just as devastating an effect on the family life and psychological health, even the physical health, of the sufferer - but according to the traditional definition, neither of these even exists.

“Addiction needs to be treated as a disease that has effects on all facets of an individual’s life: biologically, psychologically, socially, and on the family unit. Substance abuse is a subset of addiction, but it’s not the only kind of addiction,” says O’Gara, who is consultant psychiatrist and head of addiction services at the hospital, as well as a senior clinical lecturer at UCD.

At his specialist addiction unit at St. John of God Hospital, he has seen an increase in the range of severe addictions, including addicitons to codeine in painkillers, cocaine from the street, amphetamines (uppers), benzodiazepines (downers), stimulants bought over the internet, and pathological gambling.

“The indicators now are that pathological gambling will in the future sit alongside drug addiction. The neurochemical effects of gambling in the brain are similar to drug and alcohol addiction.

“Brain scanning (which is also known as functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI) gambling addicts while they are engaged in gambling demonstrates deficits in the frontal cortex, of the kind you’d see with drug addictions. Tests demonstrate deficits in areas with risk assessment and processing. This work tallies with what we see clinically – people who continue to gamble in the face of terrible consequences and know they should really stop but are simply unable to do so.”

For O’Gara, the evidence around pathological gambling as a biological illness is convincing, but he believes more evidence is needed in the cases of some other addictions. “For internet, sex and computer games there needs to be a little more evidence forthcoming for these ‘addictions’ to be classified as true illnesses ,rather than human excesses.”

Photo by aftab. on Flickr

He points to recent research in Korea which indicates that internet addiction may share many of the features of chemical addiction – “it may have the same features of tolerance and salience. In effect, what that means is that everything else goes by the wayside and the addict increases use to the point of complete disregard of other activities. We need more research in this particular area.”

Part of the difficulty for researchers is in deciding where a bad habit ends and an addiction begins. After all, not everyone who gambles, uses the internet, takes exercise or goes shopping becomes addicted; just as not everyone who enjoys beer is an alcoholic.

One of the big and – until recently – unanswered questions in our understanding of addiction was why that is: why some people succumb, and others don’t; why a lucky few appear to be able to quit smoking mid-cigarette and never really look back; why some drinkers can happily put the cork back in the bottle after a single glass, and why others simply can’t; why the majority of people who gamble or use the internet don’t let it take over the lives – and why a handful do.

It can’t merely be down to the psychoactive qualities of the substances involved, otherwise we’d all be addicts.

Then what is addiction about?

At the end of last summer, a significant breakthrough was made by those who have been battling for an understanding that goes beyond a mere physiological dependence on harmful substances.

In August, the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) declared that addiction is “not simply a behavioural problem involving too much alcohol, drugs, gambling or sex.”

“Addiction,” the ASAM declared, “is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry.

“The disease is about brains, not drugs. It’s about underlying neurology, not outward actions.”

This was big news. The statement had been four years in the making, and had involved input from 80 experts around the world. It was, as the ASAM itself noted, the first time it had taken an official position “that addiction is not solely related to problematic substance use.”

Of course, in the end, the conclusion that addiction is a disease won’t have surprised neurologists, addiction counsellors - or very many addicts themselves.

After all, the American Medical Association has been describing alcoholism as a disease since 1950.

What was new was that the ASAM wasn’t just talking about drugs and alcohol. It was referring to all forms of addiction – behavioural and chemical.

What the ASAM didn’t say was what causes this neurological tic - this faulty piece of wiring in the brains of some humans - that makes them vulnerable to what we now know is the disease called addiction, while others are remarkably resilient.

But before we can properly answer that question, we need to take a journey back in time to 1930s America.

‘The Salvation Army for Snobs’ was the nickname given to The Oxford Group, an organisation of religiously-minded men that had been founded by the Swiss Lutheran, Frank Buchman, in the 1920s.

One of its members was a man who would later become known around the world as ‘Bill W’.

Born William Griffith Wilson in November 1895, Bill W had a tough early life. He was abandoned first by one parent, and then by the other, and left to be raised by his grandparents.

At 17, he suffered a crippling bout of depression after his girlfriend died, and from then he was plagued by panic attacks and debilitating shyness.

In 1917, freshly conscripted into the military, Bill discovered alcohol and embarked on a love affair that would last 17 years. “I had found the elixir of life,” he would later say.

By 1934, after almost two decades during which he binged daily on the elixir, he was on his last legs. Following four failed rehabs in the space of a year, doctors warned him that he would die if he kept drinking.

Bill W was persuaded to join the Oxford Group by an old drinking buddy who had managed to keep sober under its guidance.

As it turned out, the Oxford Group didn’t work for Bill W – it took a hallucination brought on by the herb Belladonna while on his fifth attempt at rehab to do that. But once he had found sobriety, he decided that the only way to hold onto it was to help someone else get sober. And that is how he ended up planting the seed of what would become Alcoholics Anonymous.

Bill W, and the man he had chosen to help get sober, Dr Bob Smith (‘Dr Bob’) started small, with a group of 100 alcoholics in New York. When the got that first 100 back on the wagon, they realised that there was something uniquely effective in the approach they had taken. And so they published a book, outlining their Twelve Steps Programme.

Since then, treatment of people with addictions has actually moved on very little.

The organisation founded by Bill and Dr Bob, the AA, remains remarkably effective for some people, but it doesn't work for everyone: studies suggest it is effective in about 1 in 5 cases – roughly similar to other forms of treatment, including various types of behavioral therapy.

One of the things that it did from the very beginning was to encourage new members to attend a meeting a day for the first 90 days.

It turns out this may have been strikingly prescient.

Scientists now believe this is how long it takes for a brain which has been under the influence of drugs to ‘reset’ itself. Researchers at Yale University discovered a phenomenon they called ‘the sleeper effect’: the gradual re-engaging of proper decision making and analytical functions in the brain's prefrontal cortex, that kicks in after an addict has abstained for at least 90 days.

But if what we know about how to treat addicts has not advanced all that much since the 1930s, the same could not be said for our understanding of addiction.

Armed with sophisticated new technology, including neuroimaging, investigators have been piecing together the process by which an addiction takes residence in our brains, and formulating an understanding of which chemicals are out of balance, and which regions are affected.

What they have found is startling.

We’ve always known that addictive substances trick our brains into seeking out unhealthy sources of pleasure, and then lull us into needing more and more of them. But thanks to recent scientific advances, we now have a much better understanding of how they do it – and why non-chemical addictions can be just as difficult to control.

Drugs, researchers have discovered, are a mendacious enemy: they co-opt the very parts of our brain upon which we depend for evolutionary survival.

Human brains are programmed to pay particular attention to what neurologists call ‘salience’, or things with special relevance. Imagine the way a red dot surrounded by white dots stands out – that’s how our brains detect things which it regards as salient.

Salience detection is essential to human survival. The way you feel when, for example, you hear a crash in the middle of the night is an example of salience in action. Danger is very salient – it puts us in a state of high alert.

But so too do sex and food.

Image by ebruli on Flickr

And so, it seems, do drugs.

When we are exposed to addictive substances, our memory systems, reward circuits, decision-making skills and conditioning all kick in, a process that is like salience in overdrive. The result is a desire that is uncontrollable.

In addition, brain scans of addicts show they have reduced levels of activity in the prefrontal cortex where rational thought overrides impulsive behaviour.

Meanwhile, other neuroimaging studies suggest that obese people and substance abusers in particular have abnormal levels of dopamine in the brain, contributing to cravings.

So addicts have higher sensitivity to dopamine, higher degrees of salience, and reduced impulse control. It all makes for a very toxic combination.

In essence, then addiction is about the power struggle in the brain between the lower pleasure centres, and the higher analytic ones.

“Neuroimaging has thrown up some really interesting findings. Each addiction works on the brain in a slightly different way. In gambling addiction, which we see a lot of at our clinic, there are very obvious deficits and dysfunctions associated with risk profiling and risk assessment,” says O’Gara.

Another recent discovery - which has particular resonance in Ireland, where alcoholism and gambling addiction are a problem – is that “addictive disorders are clearly proven to have a genetic loading in the area of 30 per cent to 70 per cent,” he adds.

In other words, addiction runs in families, a factor which explains why some people seem wired to become addicted, and others can dabble in addictive substances without ever becoming hooked.

The researcher Dr Martin Paulus of the University of California in San Diego, who was one of the first to carry out brain scans on addicts, found that 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the time, he could accurately predict who would relapse within a year simply by looking at the scans of their brains.

Brain scans would show that these people had reduced levels of activation in the prefrontal cortex, where rational thought can override impulsive behavior.

In a study he carried out on methamphetamine addicts, for instance, those who were less able to complete tasks involving cognitive skills and less able to adjust to new rules quickly were found to be more likely to suffer a relapse.

His research may explain an unusual phenomenon first noted in 2006, at the clinics where weight-loss surgeries were performed on people suffering from compulsive overeating.

After the gastric band operation, some patients had indeed succeeded in stopping overeating – only to replace it with a new compulsive disorder, such as alcoholism, gambling and shopping. This phenomenon was described by psychiatrists as ‘addiction transfer’.

The closer we get to an understanding of the neurobiology of addiction, the more intense the race to find effective treatments. And it no longer seems outside the bounds of possibility that we will one day be able to cure addiction.

After all, a drug that could cure cravings – whether it’s for cocaine, cigarettes or chocolate – would be a gigantic market. And it’s not a very distant prospect: a vaccine for cocaine use is already going through clinical trials in the US.

“There are medications that are already effective,” says O’Gara.

“There are anti-craving medications, and there are aversive therapies that can be effective. But where the field is going now is in the direction of pharmacogenetic developments.

“What that means is that soon, we might be able to look at people’s genetic profiles and see which medications they’re likely to respond to, just as we can with breast cancer. We’ll be able to predict which drugs will work and what the side effects are likely to be.”

For the moment, O’Gara says, a broad base of treatment remains the most effective form – including psychological therapy, medication and family support.

“But the situation now for addicts is very hopeful. More hopeful than it’s ever been.”

This article first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on October 23, 2011

Maire*: “While you’re getting sober your alcoholism is in the wardrobe doing push-ups”

I started drinking at 17, I drank for 17 years and now I’m 17 years sober.

I remember feeling very guilty after my very first drink. For the first few years, my drinking was normal. But when I hit my thirties and my friends were starting to scale back, I just kept on drinking

The first time I thought I had a problem was at my sister’s wedding. My parents asked me not to drink. I was driving people home after the reception, so I remember thinking: why would I drink?

But it was a cold day, and after the photos I found myself having a glass of punch to warm me up. And I just wasn’t able to stop. Driving home I nearly crashed the car, but everyone else was so drunk they didn’t notice.

Over the next five years, it went from bad to worse. Nobody realised I had a problem because I managed to hide it so well. I worked in advertising, so drinking was part of the culture.

I wasn’t a particularly heavy drinker – usually one bottle of wine a day did me. But when things got bad, I was going without food – I was surviving on alcohol, nicotine and coffee. I had no idea how it felt to be hungry.

When drink controls you, you don’t control it – that’s my definition of addiction.

It came to a head one night when I made a phone call, a revenge phone call – and as I was talking I was thinking to myself I’m not getting any satisfaction out of this even now.

I stopped for three days, and then I had some more wine on a night out with colleagues. When I got home I drank two more bottles, and made another nasty phone call. And the next day, Friday December 17, I went to AA.

I sat there looking at the people coming in, thinking she’s not an alcoholic, he’s not an alcoholic – and eventually I thought, these people are just like me.

If anybody had told me what the first two years of getting sober were going to be like, maybe I’d never have stopped. They were the toughest two years of my life.

I dispute the whole disease thing – partly because I believe it takes away personal responsibility. An alcoholic has responsibility for their drinking, at least before they pick up the first drink.

But I recognize I have an addictive personality. I’m still the same today with chocolate or anything like that. When I stopped drinking, my cigarette compulsion increased though I’ve since stopped smoking too, and food is still a struggle. I would love to become addicted to balance.

I feel safe now but I don’t feel complacent. While you’re getting sober your alcoholism is in the wardrobe doing push-ups.

*Last name withheld

The porn addict* “I was watching porn for eight hours a day.”

When I was about 16 I was very interested in porn magazines, even to the point where I was stealing magazines from Eason’s and from my friends.

At about that time, I was sexually abused by a relative. I have no doubt that it was a formative experience in my developing sexuality and it has a relationship with my subsequent addiction problems.

I graduated onto videos from sex shops in my early 20s. I was living in Dublin and was never a huge socialiser. I started taking days off work just to stay home and watch them. One of the effects of it is that you get very devitalized, so my health was quite bad.

When I moved from Dublin to Cork with work, I got my first laptop. I didn’t have any friends, so I would come home from work every day for about a year, smoke dope and watch porn online.

The net result of that was that I developed a very short attention span. I was tired, pale, impatient, anxious, and I was starting to become kind of delirious. I had repetitive stress disorder in my left arm, and a pain in my right shoulder.

They asked me to leave my job. Around the same time, I met my current girlfriend, and we travelled to France together and things got much better. When I’m not exposed to electronic equipment, I don’t crave it.

But in the last three to four years, it became a huge problem again. I was getting up in the night while she was asleep to watch porn – I was watching it for up to eight hours a day. I was not able to socialise, I couldn’t concentrate, I was tired and disinterested.

Because of that we broke up for a year. At that stage, I just wanted a life. It was becoming very apparent to me that it would take me days just to recover from one night.

I got back together with my girlfriend, we moved back in together to a place in the country, and she got pregnant immediately. For the duration of the pregnancy I don’t think I was watched porn at all. Having the baby was great.

It wasn’t until our daughter was a couple of months old that I started to watch it the odd time. Then it just went on from there – it got to the point where I would contrive to be alone with the computer. It turned me into this horrible person – impatient, and nervous and very irrational.

I gave up for the last time four weeks ago, because I know it’s over between us if I don’t. I just went cold turkey. For the first four days I sat in front of Twitter and smoked about an ounce of dope a week. On the fifth day, I restricted myself to my phone and not using the computer, on the sixth day I didn’t use any electronic equipment at all.

I would say I’m more obsessive than addictive, but it is in my family. My dad is an alcoholic, he is sober 20 years, and my mother has shown all the signs of gambling addiction.

I’ve got a life, a job, great prospects and it wouldn’t take very much for me to lose it all like a flash. If I went back to watching porn, my girlfriend would leave me, and because we work together that would be the end of my career too.

It’s make or break time.

*Name witheld.

A fat tax isn't fair and it probably won't work. But here's why I think we should have one anyway

2011-10-23T12:04:00.003+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

You can learn a lot about life from fridge magnets. I recently came across one which read: “If hunger is not the problem, then eating’s not the solution.”

As slimming mantras go, it’s not bad: it’s breezy, memorable and succinct enough to laminate and stick on your fridge.

As a recipe for tackling the country’s obesity crisis, though, it has its shortcomings. Too often, you see, hunger is the problem.

Photo by x-ray delta one on Flickr

We are now in the peculiar position where many of us are simultaneously starving and obese.

According to OECD data for 2010, we have the second highest obesity rates in the whole of Europe. Twenty three per cent of the adult population are shockingly, life-threateningly fat.

A further one in three of us are merely too damn fat. And it’s not just the adults: 327,000 Irish children, too, are either obese or overweight right now. Another 10,000 will be overweight by next year.

In fact, give it another two decades and one in two of us will be obese: not just too fat, but actually clinically obese.

The problem, clearly, is not that we’re dying of a lack of food. It’s that the kind of food we are choosing to eat is killing us.

By leading sedentary lifestyles and consuming diets that are high in sugar and saturated fats, and low in things like protein and vitamins, we are depriving ourselves of the nutrients that we need to survive, and ward off things like heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

And all the while, we’re getting fatter.

Click on link below to read on >

Think it sounds too melodramatic to be true? Just look at countries like Papua New Guinea, Samoa and South Africa where childhood malnutrition and obesity now go hand in hand.

The trouble is that filling up on the empty calories in fizzy drinks and cheap meals of burgers and chips causes your blood sugars to spike, and then crash. An hour later, you’re hungry again, and craving more sugar, so you reach for a doughnut. And so the cycle continues.

Denmark, which has an adult obesity rate of just 11.4 per cent, has come up with one way of tackling what it intends to ensure doesn’t become a significant problem.

As of this month, all foods with a saturated fat content of 2.3 per cent or higher will be subject to an additional tax – so, for example, a small pack of butter now costs an extra 30 cent.

Last month, Hungary introduced new taxes on fatty foods, sugar, alcohol and foods with high levels of caffeine.

Critics say it’ll never work. They point out that it unfairly targets the poor; that it smacks of nanny-statism; that there’s no proof behaviour-modifying taxes are effective. They insist that the picture of sedentary guzzlers burdening the state with their massive health bills is appealingly simple – but it’s also misleading. They’re absolutely right, of course.

But I’m still in favour of a fat tax. And a sugar tax too – which has already been introduced in France as a way of targeting fizzy drinks, and is something currently being considered by the government. Oh, and clearer labelling and better education about food and nutrition.

However, you’ve got to start somewhere, and a fat tax is as good a place as any.

I’m no economist, but it seems to me that the principle of a well thought-out taxation system is one which taxes less of the things we want more of - like jobs and the big multinationals that create them - and more of the things we want less of - like tobacco, alcohol, petrol and unhealthy foods.

One of the most compelling arguments against a fat tax is that it’s not fair, in that it punishes those on lower incomes who can’t afford to eat well.

It is certainly true that nutritious foods are more expensive.

A quick survey of the aisles at my local supermarket reveals that a six pack of Jazz apples costs €3.29, while two five packs of chocolate filled doughnuts are on special offer at €1.50.

A 454g pack of four frozen quarter pounders? €3.89. Or you can make your own using a 400g pack of premium mince – which costs €4.

Need something cheap for the family dinner? A packet of stir-fry vegetables is €2.40 – but you can have a twin pack of four cheese pizzas for €1.44. Likewise, a two litre bottle of fizzy orange is €2.19, while a two litre carton of real, not-from-concentrate orange juice is €4.59.

But it strikes me that there’s a fairly simple solution to this. Any additional tax revenue generated through a fat or sugar tax must be used to offer incentives to producers to reduce the price of fruit, vegetables, eggs and fresh fish.

The other thing I like about the ‘fat tax’ is the way it sounds.

We’ve become far too coy about the way we talk about this problem, as though the mere mention of the word ‘fat’ stigmatises the overweight, or those in lower economic groups; contributes to childhood anorexia rates, or piles more body-related tyranny onto all women. All of which is very laudable.

But by avoiding calling it what it is, we’re also detracting from the personal responsibility element. ‘Obesity’ sounds like a medical condition, while ‘fat’ sounds like what it is – a lifestyle choice.

The truth is that while there may be higher rates of obesity amongst people on lower incomes, being thin is not a rich person’s prerogative. If you want to lose weight, it’s not easy – but nor is it terribly complicated. It doesn’t cost anything at all. You simply consume less and exercise more.

So let’s stop treating this as a class issue, when it’s a problem that will soon affect half the adult population.

We are fat because of the way we live. It’s an issue so closely bound up in every aspect of our lives that no single solution is going to provide the magic bullet. But a fat tax would be a step in the right direction.

This column first appeared in the Irish Independent Weekend magazine on Saturday October 22, 2011

Trial and error: Interview with Carlo Dalla Vedova, Amanda Knox's Italian-Irish lawyer

2011-10-17T12:32:00.000+01:00

Carlo Dalla Vedova, the Italian-Irish defence lawyer who represented Amanda Knox in her sensational murder case, believes that fundamental errors by the Italian police led to her original conviction

By Jennifer O'Connell

Last weekend, after four years, Carlo Dalla Vedova finally got the phone call for which he’d been waiting.

‘‘Ciao Carlo," the voice on the other end of the line said. ‘‘It’s Amanda."

‘‘She was walking in the forest near her home, and she just called to say she was fine," Dalla Vedova says.

‘‘Do you know that was the first time we ever talked on the phone? Every other time we’ve spoken, it’s been in the jail in Perugia or in the courtroom. So it was good to get the first call. I felt a particular emotion, getting that phone call."

It’s hardly surprising that the emotion is still evident in the soft-spoken, Italian-Irish lawyer’s voice. When we speak, it is exactly a week since Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were acquitted of the murder of 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher.

Whatever you thought of her before - and everyone had a view on the woman the media had always called ‘Foxy Knoxy’, a nickname her friends and family say she got for her footballing skills - it was difficult to remain unmoved by the intensely emotional scenes in the courtroom that day.

As the acquittal was read out, Knox seemed almost to collapse in on herself, her shoulders heaving as she buried her face in her hands.

It was left to Dalla Vedova, who was seated beside her, and his colleague, Maria del Grosso, to prop her up.

Only a brief smile over his shoulder at Amanda’s family betrayed any emotion on Dalla Vedova’s part.

When the cameras panned back on the sparse courtroom, which had erupted into cheers and chaos as Knox and Sollecito were led out, Dalla Vedova cut a serene figure in the centre of the maelstrom: standing in front of the bench where he had just pulled off the most high-profile acquittal of his career, he calmly removed and folded his collar and robes.

‘‘We were all tired," he says. ‘‘She was very fragile by the end of that week – it was a very difficult week. It went on until 7, half past 7, in court every day, and the outcome was never certain.

Amanda was very scared. She wasn’t sure that the court was going to dismiss the case against her, so she was frightened."

The path to freedom for his client was a long and at times a very uncertain one - though Dalla Vedova says that he never doubted Knox’s innocence or that she would ultimately be acquitted.

‘‘I never had any doubts," he says. ‘‘It was a mistake from the beginning, a case that should never have come to trial. I am happy that Amanda is home and happy that the mistake has been rectified. What happened [on October 3] was the correct application of a principle of law. Justice has superseded a terrible mistake."

Just two days after handing down the acquittal verdict, Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann was reported in Italian newspapers as saying that: ‘‘This will remain an unsolved truth. No one can say how things went." It was an odd statement for a judge to make of two people he had just acquitted of murder.

But it may well be the case that the ‘real truth’ of what happened that November night in 2007 in the house on Perugia’s Pergola Road, events which culminated in the brutal murder of Meredith Kercher, will never be known.

And Dalla Vedova, for one, is not about to start speculating. However, he is adamant about one thing: his client was not there.

‘‘I’m a defence lawyer and I defend my clients. That is my job. My job is not to point to the guilt of other parties," he says emphatically, when asked about the judge’s suggestion that Rudy Guede, who is serving a 16-year sentence for Meredith’s death, did not act alone. ‘‘You will not find one word in the transcripts of this trial on Rudy Guede."

However, later in our conversation, he refers to the case as a ‘‘single person murder’’.

I ask him about revelations during the trial that a number of fingerprints had been found in the house, which had never been assigned to anyone.

‘‘There were a number of fingerprints that have been described as ‘not attributed’, but that’s not necessarily significant," Dalla Vedova says. ‘‘There were people coming in and out all the time - four people were living there, remember. So maybe they were there because there were friends and parties going on in the house. They were students, so people were coming and going."

He believes the damming criticisms made during the appeal of the way evidence was collected and handled could be extended to other, more fundamental errors in the investigation and to two in particular.

‘‘I always knew from the beginning, from the day we were appointed, that Amanda was innocent," Dalla Vedova says. ‘‘She was always clear that she had spent that night with Raffaele. ‘‘The problems started during the activity at the criminal phase of the investigation – Amanda was questioned for 55 hours in five days, and during that time she had no legal representation. The authorities identified Amanda as a possible suspect, and then they set about amassing evidence. The decision was taken too quickly - that was the first mistake."

The second mistake, he says, was in the failure of the investigators to recognise the first one.

‘‘Mistakes sometimes are difficult to admit, especially when there were so many people involved. The order of arrest of Amanda was signed by 36 people - that means 36 police officers and prosecutors signed it.

‘‘At 3 o’clock on the day of the arrest, they held a press conference and announced that the case was closed - that was four days after Meredith’s death. Four days," he says, still incredulous.

‘‘Then they looked for evidence to connect Amanda to the scene. There was no evidence in the room where Meredith died, but they found Amanda’s DNA in a drop of blood in the bidet in the bathroom. They found nothing at the crime scene, and of course there would be her DNA in the house - she was living there."

Then there was a further twist. All the evidence in Meredith’s bedroom pointed to an as-yet unknown person, rather than to Knox or Sollecito.

Investigators quickly announced that they had another suspect, a west African drifter and small-time crook, Rudy Guede, who had been arrested on several previous occasions for breaking and entering in possession of a knife, and repeatedly released. He was hauled back from Germany, where he had fled after the murder, and arrested on arrival in Italy.

His trial was fast-tracked when he admitted being in the house, and he is serving a 16-year sentence for Meredith’s murder.

‘‘When they found the handprint, the bloody handprint on a pillow case that was under Meredith’s body - they should have realised immediately that this murder was a single-person murder," Dalla Vedova says. ‘‘They released Patrick Lumumba (the Congolese bar owner, whom Knox had implicated during initial questioning - under duress, she would later say), but they kept Sollecito and Knox in the picture. This was the second mistake."

Once they had decided on the American’s guilt, and that of her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, the prosecutors set about finding a motive – what Dalla Vedova would call during his summing up as ‘‘fantasy and hypothesis’’.

Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini offered the jury an elaborate story in which Knox wanted to scare her housemate in a sex game, but Knox got stoned, a knife was introduced, and the game went too far. Knox was portrayed as a temptress who would lead the two men on what would later be called ‘an unstoppable crescendo of violence’’, partly to get revenge on Meredith Kercher, because she had criticised her promiscuity and hygiene.

Lumumba’s lawyer, meanwhile, described Knox as ‘‘a diabolical, satanic, demonic she-devil’’ who ‘‘likes alcohol, drugs and hot, wild sex’’.

Dalla Vedova says the suggestion that there was ever conflict between Knox and her housemate is a fallacy.

‘‘Amanda was always friends with Meredith," he says. ‘‘She always said that from day one - they were friends. The day before the murder was Halloween and they were in touch with each other on SMS, trying to meet up. Plus there’s a number of pictures of them together. So that was another big mistake made by the prosecution, to imply that they were not friends. Amanda was a friend of Meredith, and I think Meredith’s mother knows that, despite what has been said in the media."

But of all the mistakes made, the most serious - and ultimately the most fatal - related to the manner in which evidence was collected.

Much was made of the discovery of traces of Sollecito’s DNA on Kercher’s bra clasp. But videos shown in court portrayed the investigators picking the clasp up, passing it from hand to hand, dropping it again and then picking it back up, before finally taking it away in a plastic bag, to be tested six weeks later. Further testing was inconclusive, and the clasp has now rusted so cannot be retested.

The other key piece of prosecution evidence was a knife found in Sollecito’s apartment, which, investigators claimed, had traces of Kercher’s blood on the blade, Knox’s fingerprints on the handle, and had been washed in bleach.

The independent forensic experts appointed by the court to review the case during the appeal found that the knife had not been cleaned with bleach, and if it had any traces of Kercher’s blood, they were far too small to test.

In fact, other experts have claimed, it had nothing more incriminating on it than potato starch. As Dalla Vedova pointed out in court, its blade didn’t match the wounds on Kercher’s body.

‘‘They should have realised that as soon as there was a new person that the decision to announce ‘case closed’ was premature - all the evidence pointed to Guede, he admitted to being there, there was evidence connected to him in the house, in the room, even inside the body. What more do you need?" Dalla Vedova says.

What they now needed, it seems, was to save face - ‘la faccia’, as it’s known in Italy.

Once the ‘caso chiuso’ announcement had been made, it was difficult to row back on. His reputation - the reputation of the entire Italian police force - was on the line.

A sustained media assault, fuelled by police leaks, was launched on Knox. In his summing up to the jury, Dalla Vedova described her as ‘‘crucified’’ and ‘‘impaled’’ by the media reports.

However, despite everything that his client suffered, Dalla Vedova does not believe the Italian legal system has been damaged and points out that the process was ultimately vindicated.

‘‘I don’t think there’s any damage to the Italian justice system," he says. ‘‘Italian justice has been proved to be fair: a terrible mistake was made, and that terrible mistake has been rectified.

‘‘There are a number of legal systems that do not provide the right of appeal. But the appeal has been introduced by our legislature to act as a check against mistakes. Our legal system gives that guarantee to the individual that they can appeal if they believe a verdict is unfair. It could have been faster, it could certainly be criticised for being slow, but it was fair."

The Amanda Knox who appeared in court for the verdict on her appeal was a different woman to the baby-faced 20-year-old, who thoughtlessly kissed her boyfriend outside the house where her flatmate had been brutally murdered, and callously performed cartwheels and did splits while she was waiting to be questioned by the police.

‘‘Oh yes she has matured," her lawyer says. ‘‘She was a naive girl at the beginning, she was only 20. Even one day in jail will change you and she was there for four years. She has grown."

Media reports from Seattle last week suggested that she was slowly reclaiming the pieces of her old life: the only time she has been seen out in public was during a trip to the supermarket to buy toothpaste and a Hershey bar.

What are Dalla Vedova’s hopes for her for the future? He pauses, as though he’s hardly had time to consider anything beyond the acquittal. ‘‘My hopes for Amanda? I don’t know - I hope she goes back to study, I hope she can find a new balance in her life, and some happiness. I would like her to be happy."

Dalla Vedova laughs when I wonder if he’s off on a long holiday now - though he is planning a short trip to Dublin soon which he says will be for ‘‘family and business’’ reasons.

His mother, Lolly Maguire, was brought up in Brighton Square in the south Dublin suburb of Rathgar. She married an Italian lawyer, Carlo’s father, Riccardo Dalla Vedova, and moved with him to Rome, where they raised their family. Carlo and his brother have both joined the family law practice.

The 48-year-old remains in frequent contact with his family here.

‘‘My mother is Irish, I am Irish, and my children are Irish," he says.

So who did he support in the Rugby World Cup? He laughs. ‘‘I was sorry about Italy, but we will look forward to the Six Nations," he says.

In the meantime, his thoughts have turned to the next phase in the process of clearing Knox’s name.

Mignini has already said he is confident the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest appeals tribunal, ‘‘will deliver justice’’, although this court is only able to review evidence, and observers believe it’s unlikely Knox would ever be extradited from the US now.

‘‘For now, the next thing we have to wait for is the publication of the motivation," Dalla Vedova says. ‘‘This is the judge’s reason behind the decision, and it must be filed within 90 days, so by January 3. At that stage, there will be a possibility to appeal to the Supreme Court.

‘‘I’m a bit surprised that it has been announced so widely before the document was published that the prosecution intends to appeal. I’m sure this is premature."

But he insists he is ready to carry the fight on for as long as it takes.

‘‘We are not worried," he says. ‘‘We are ready to fight again - if there will be a new appeal opposing this decision, then we will be ready."

This interview was first published in The Sunday Business Post on October 16, 2011

Brought to you courtesy of Disney Pixar...

2011-10-16T12:34:00.009+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

Everything you need to know about child-rearing in the modern age could probably be summed up in a few short phrases. Breastfeeding: good. Sugar: bad. Fresh air: good. Sun: bad. Too much freedom: problematic. Too much mollycoddling: deeply problematic.

But there’s one essential rule of modern parenting which overrides all others. It’s the dictum with which no responsible adult could possibly argue - especially not as they stick another Fireman Sam DVD into the player.

It is the commandment which states that television is always, always bad.

The negative effects of television were summed up by author John Steinbeck as long ago as 1955: “The mouth grows slack and the lips hang open; the eyes take on a hypnotized or doped look; the nose runs rather more than usual; the backbone turns to water and the fingers slowly and methodically pick the designs out of brocade furniture. Such is the appearance of semiconsciousness that one wonders how much of the ‘message’ of television is getting through to the brain.”

And our views haven’t changed much since. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television at all for children under the age of two, and only two hours a day of ‘quality programming’ for older children.

Meanwhile, countless studies have depicted the havoc that television wreaks on children’s waistlines, their behaviour, their sleep habits and their ability to concentrate.

Studies have shown that children who watch more than four hours a day are more likely to be overweight; that children who watch TV are less well able to interact with others; that for every hour a television was turned on, babies heard 770 fewer words from an adult; that even the poor old Teletubbies hamper language development in eight-month to 30-month-olds.

Recently, yet another study showed that children who watch nine minutes of Spongebob perform half as well at tasks involving following rules – and are four times more likely to go out afterwards robbing cars (okay, I may have made that last bit up.)

To make the case in favour of more television is not just difficult: it’s practically heresy. But I’m going to do it anyway, because I think television’s been getting an unfairly bad press.

As a parent, admitting you use the television as a babysitter is akin to owning up to putting chocolate milk in your baby’s bottle, or bragging that you taught your 3-year-old the lyrics to Rihanna’s S&M.

But sometimes the television is the only thing that stands between you and unwashed hair/a hungry baby/a missed deadline/a week’s worth of dirty laundry, or a near total breakdown. And if that’s the case, then I say: bring it on.

Let’s face it, we all use the television as a babysitter from time to time. And I really don’t get why we’re supposed to feel so guilty about it. You won’t find a more attentive or a less expensive babysitter. And there’s no chance the television is going to invite its boyfriend round while you’re in the other room.

But that’s not the reason I really take issue with the anti-television crusade.

The biggest bone I have to pick with it is the notion that TV has nothing positive to offer young viewers, and that the very best you can hope for is that it’s doing them no harm.

I remember meeting a famous actress feeding the ducks in the park with her two-year-old. As the child started counting the ducks loudly and in fluent Spanish, the actress turned around to the assembled, awe-struck parents, shrugged and uttered a single word: “Dora”.

We all got it. It was code for: “Don’t judge me. I’m not a pushy parent. I have nothing to do with this. I just dumped her in front of the TV and this is how she turned out.”

In fact, it’s thanks to Dora the Explorer that every two- and three-year-old of my acquaintance has a handful of words in Spanish and, courtesy of TG4’s preschool schedule, Irish. And that can’t be all bad.

When they were younger, both my children loved a programme called Something Special that goes out daily on the BBC’s CBeebies channel. It’s for children with special needs, and teaches all kids about sign language, and learning to appreciate difference.

Then there’s Pinky, RTE’s own programme – the first in the world of its kind -about a little girl with Down Syndrome.

Or how about Sesame Street, which was my favourite programme when I was a child? Several studies have found that adults who watched it, and other educational programs as preschoolers, did better at school, were reading more books, placed more value on achievement, and were more creative.

Everything I love about Sesame Street could be summed up in an episode broadcast in the US last week. Viewers were introduced to a new character, a red-haired puppet based on a seven-year-old child called Lily. Lily tells Elmo that she sometimes doesn’t know whether there’ll be food for her next meal. “And that’s hard.”

Along with the usual songs, and segments explaining the concept of ‘food pantries’ (food kitchens), there were vignettes filmed with real children who have experienced poverty. In one of them, seven-year-old Josie, says that when her father wasn't working, there was no money for snacks at school. "So what I would do is just drink some water from the fountain," she says, "until my stomach's full of water.”

Should our children really be exposed to notions as difficult as a childhood poverty and hunger?

According to Barnardos, over 90,000 Irish children now live in consistent poverty – that’s more than one in seven. And as many as one in three report being deprived of one or more item children themselves considered essential.

Unfortunately, hunger and deprivation are now facts of life for many of them, and so of course all children should be taught about them - just as they should be exposed to programmes about other facts of life like cooking, simple mathematics, reading, gardening, people in wheelchairs, friendship, and having fun.

I can’t think of a better way to do it than through a singalong with Big Bird. Though even the occasional episode of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is probably not going to do them any long term harm.

Disclosure: This week’s column was brought to you courtesy of Disney Pixar.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on October 16 2011.

Confessions of a hairy teenager

2011-10-15T12:51:00.001+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

The British entrepreneur, Duncan Bannatyne, is in hot water over revelations that the chain of beauty salons he owns is offering leg waxing to 13-year-olds.

Parents posting on internet chat rooms are outraged that the Dragon’s Den star appears to be encouraging teenagers to “waste time and money removing perfectly normal body hair”. The founder of the influential chat forum Mumsnet, Justine Roberts, told one newspaper: “You'd hope there would be a longer period of grace for girls to be girls and not obsess about being hairless.”

That is a lot of idealistic nonsense.

And I should know - I first got my legs waxed at 13.

In a perfect world, as Roberts says, you would hope that young girls could remain ignorant of the joys of waxing rash and ingrown hairs for longer.

But I’m guessing that for Roberts to be able to say that, she can’t have been a particularly hirsute teenager.

As an adolescent who might kindly have been described as flocculent, however, I applaud him.

My period of fuzz-free grace ended the second puberty exploded into my life. By the time I was 13, I had legs that would have looked good teamed with a pair of football shorts and boots, and enough hair on my arms to ensure that sleeves were an unnecessary luxury in winter.

My bristly limbs were a constant source of teasing in the playground, and it made me self-conscious, embarrassed and miserable.

I gave up wearing shorts and skirts in the summer, and mooched around, hot and unhappy, in jeans, until my mother could take it no more.

A card-carrying feminist and a responsible parent, she nonetheless decided that she couldn’t stand by and watch my ill-fated experiments with family sized tubs of Jolen bleach, my father’s razor, or the toe-curlingly painful prehistoric grooming machine known as the Epilady.

Wisely, she decided that if I was determined to do something about my body hair, waxing was the way to go. And so she booked me into a local salon and handed me two Disprin.

I wasn’t emotionally scarred by that first waxing experience, or any of the dozens I had throughout my teenage years. I didn’t develop a cosmetic surgery habit or fall prey to body image issues – on the contrary, I felt much better about myself when I discovered that the main source of my insecurity could be dealt with in half an hour on the beautician’s table.

The row between Bannatyne and Roberts is just the latest in a long line of controversies surrounding what young girls do with, or wear on, their bodies.

It’s such a heated issue that no fewer than four separate reports have been commissioned in the UK in the past ten years into what’s being called ‘corporate paedophilia’ – the marketing of prematurely sexualising clothes and accessories to children.

Acres of column inches have been devoted to worrying over the sale of padded bras and heels to children, or claims that mothers were taking little girls for spray tans in advance of their first communion.

I can’t help feeling that it’s slightly creepy – and not indicative of a particularly healthy society - this newfound obsession with little girls and their bodies.

Despite all the newspaper reports dedicated to bemoaning the sexualisation of children, I don’t see much evidence of it. In fact, I’m not convinced little girls have changed all that profoundly since I was one.

Back then, we were just as interested in identifying and mimicking what grown-ups said, did, and wore. We pranced about the house in our mother’s lipstick and high heels; the only difference today is that it’s more likely to be their own lipstick and high heels, and they might actually leave the house dressed like that too.

Yes, some adolescents dress in a manner and listen to music with lyrics that occasionally causes me to choke on my Ovaltine – but what generation hasn’t been shocked by the dress sense and musical taste of the one that came after it?

I don’t think little girls are the problem. I think the problem is with the rest of us.

It’s as though we’ve been so rocked by the child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and recent high profile cases of child abductions, that we no longer trust other adults to know how to behave when confronted with an eight-year-old in a sparkly pink t-shirt.

And so what started out as a well-intentioned drive to improve child-protection measures has become a hysterical overreaction to the merest hint that children are, in fact, nascent adults, and future sexual beings.

The suspicion that this is all a bit of a storm in a double A cup is borne out by a report carried out by the Scottish parliament into the sexualisation of children on the high street.

The team of researchers commissioned to look into the problem found…well, not very much at all. “While there are undoubtedly some “sexualised” goods aimed at children, there are relatively few of them, and their availability is limited,” it concluded.

The bottom line is that while you might not like your six-year-old acquiring a wardrobe made up of more pink than you’d find in the entire Mattel factory, or while you might prefer your thirteen year old not to wax, that’s a question of taste rather than one of actual harm.

Actual harm is what you do to your child if you force her to endure years of mockery over a cosmetic problem that could be remedied with 20 minutes and the price of a coffee and sandwich.

In my experience, if there is a pressure on children, it’s less about prematurely sexualising them, and more about encouraging in them the notion that they must conform to a single body type.

I was shopping in Gap recently and came across a pair of jeans for 3-year-olds marketed under the label ‘Mini Skinny’.

Give me a preteen waxing habit any day.

This column first appeared in the Irish Independent Weekend magazine on October 15, 2011

Why I won't be voting for Martin McGuinness

2011-10-09T13:08:00.002+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

One of my first jobs as a journalist was to cover the aftermath of the Omagh bombing. To say I was ill-equipped for the task is like saying a polar bear is ill-equipped to write a sonnet.

I was 23 years old, doing a Masters in Journalism, and working weekends at the now-defunct Independent Network News.

I was up early the morning of August 16, 1998, and in the Dublin newsroom by 6am. I would be working the morning shift alone.

There was a note on my desk left for me by one of my colleagues: “You’ll know by now that there was a bomb in Omagh. It’s big. Good luck.” After that, I was on my own.

By the time I went home, shattered and numb, it was clear that the number of those killed by the republican splinter group, the Real IRA, would exceed any other single act of the Troubles. Ultimately, 29 people died and more than 220 were injured.

I remember crying as I walked around the supermarket later that day, and the numbness began to lift.

The memorial garden at Omagh: image via geograph.ie

And that’s as close as I have come to being directly affected by the Troubles.

I never write about the north precisely because of this; because southern commentators writing or speaking about it will always be locked in what the great Nuala O’Faolain called “a dialogue of the deaf”.

They say that, without having lived through it, we don’t understand; we can’t understand.

We say that’s true – but maybe not having lived through it gives us a sharper perspective on the difference between right and wrong.

They try to put the killings in a social and historical context, and we nod politely and think yes, but that still doesn’t account for a single one of the 2,000 people killed by the IRA during the period of the Troubles.

The see us nodding politely and decide we’re more of those ‘West Brit southern media commentators’ that get so much up Martin McGuinness’s nose.

And so, in the interests of sharing the same, small island and preserving the peace process, we’ve mostly avoided having those kind of conversations.

Of course, all that’s changed now. Now McGuinness has invited us to vote for him as President. He has, in effect, asked us what we think.

And never before has the divide between how nationalists north and south think been thrown into such sharp relief.

In the north, many nationalists today believe McGuinness stands for, in the words of his republican colleague Danny Morrison last week, “ceasefire and peace and negotiation and dialogue”.

They know he was in the IRA, but – as McGuinness said in an interview with the London Independent a few days back– “I don't think the majority of people – to be quite honest – care” when, or if, he ever left it.

In the south, too, a large number of people no longer care, as evidenced by his showing in the polls and the Sinn Fein vote at election time.

But for many more of us, he continues to stand for a period we’d rather forget; a dark time of fear, violence and intimidation, a time when being Irish meant being ashamed.

Last weekend, as Martin McGuiness was being interviewed by Eamonn Dunphy on Newstalk radio, the government chief whip Paul Kehoe tweeted that he “wouldn’t trust Martin McGuinness to take my dog for a walk”, adding a moment later: “Why would you need your salary when you have the proceeds of the northern bank at your disposal?”

It was crude, inappropriate and intemperate – and it sure as hell won’t help Gay Mitchell’s electoral chances. And yet, it probably reflected what a great many of those listening felt.

McGuinness wants to be seen as a freedom fighter turned statesman, in the mould of a Mandela or a Castro. But his public image south of the border is still a long way from that.

He argues that people in the north have moved on, even unionists have moved on - and that it’s time the rest of the people on this island did too. But I think he’s got it the wrong way round.

It’s McGuinness who needs to catch up with us.

After all, it was only last Monday, in that interview with the London Independent, that he finally admitted that the accidental killings of innocent civilians by the IRA could legitimately be seen as “murder”.

It was also only in the last fortnight that he described the 1987 Enniskillen bombing, when the IRA killed 11 civilians, as "atrocious", and said he was “ashamed” of the republicans who carried it out.

It was only since the presidential campaign got underway that he felt inclined to sympathise with the relatives of all those who lost their lives, including the families of British and Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers and RUC police officers.

This shift in his language at this time is not a coincidence – say what you like about McGuinness, but he’s no fool.

Will it be enough to salve the doubts of nationalists south of the border, to offer them sufficient comfort that they might tick the box beside his name on October 27?

Yes, it will be enough for some. There are a lot of people who are disillusioned with the political establishment, who have lost their jobs or are struggling to pay their mortgage, who may feel ready to vote Sinn Fein again, or for the first time.

And even if they didn’t feel especially inclined before last weekend, the crude nature of the attacks being launched on him by that same establishment may well have helped them make up their mind.

But there are many more who do care when or whether McGuinness left the IRA; who want to know what exactly he did in its name; who would like to hear him say who he protected, and who he’s continuing to protect.

There are many for whom McGuinness’s newfound rhetoric of shame and compassion is too little, too late.

I admire what he achieved in the peace process. I wish him well. But I won’t be voting for him.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on October 9 2011

How to be a celebrity mum

2011-10-08T13:29:00.002+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

There is something special about the way celebrities have babies.

I’m not referring to the fact that, in the world of celebrity, ‘having a baby’ can mean anything from ‘raiding an orphanage in a developing country’, to ‘borrowing someone else’s womb’. Or even ‘elective C-section at 36 weeks, followed by tummy tuck and breast uplift’.

No, what’s really intriguing is how, despite the fact that it’s only happened, oh, 106 billion times before, every celebrity appears convinced that they are the first to have a baby. The actual first. The original Madonna, the mother of Adam and Lucy of Hadar rolled into one.

For most mothers-to-be, the blue line in the positive window on a pregnancy test signals a time of unfettered joy, trepidation – followed by nine long months of snivelling at news bulletins, watching your ankles swell to the width of the Aviva stadium and mainlining scones topped with gherkins and melted cheese (although that may just have been me).

But for celebrities it means something else entirely.

For them, pregnancy is an invitation to start holding forth like a cross between the Dalai Lama, Zita West and Moses on Mount Sinai on all matters reproductive.

“You simply can’t imagine how wonderful it feels,” they will gush.

“Gosh, I could be pregnant all the time,” coos Kate Hudson.

“I love doing his little laundry. I love ironing his romper suits. I didn’t even know I had an iron!” marvels Liz Hurley.

"When you're having dinner [and] you're dying laughing because your three-year-old made a fart joke, that's real happiness,” muses Gwyneth Paltrow.

"I love the smell of diapers; I even like when they're wet and you smell them all warm like a baked good,” witters Sarah Jessica Parker.

And so, tediously, on.

Beyoncé is the latest celebrity to join the hordes of the happy nappy-sniffers, having announced her pregnancy at the VMA awards last month.

In many respects, hers has been quite the old-fashioned affair. She is married to the father of her child, and – as far as we know – the conception happened in the conventional way. But what she lost out on in terms of space-age style reproductive techniques and foreign travel opportunities, she has made up for in the sheer, mind-numbing banality of her pronouncements on the subject.

Ever since her pregnancy was announced at the recent VMA awards, fans have been treated to one deeply unfascinating insight after another. We have learned that she hates the smell of onions and her husband’s aftershave; that pregnancy makes her empowered; that she’s having a boy. Or possibly a girl.

The latest such revelations concern her thoughts on maternity leave. In a nutshell, she won’t be taking any, because she doesn’t believe pregnancy is an illness.

“It is important that I don't look at this as like an illness. I am not sick. I am the same woman and I have the same passions.”

Sweetly, Beyoncé seems to have forgotten that, at the end of all this wonder and feeling empowered, there will, with luck, be a baby to care for - and that caring for the baby is generally regarded as the purpose of maternity leave.

Perhaps she’s planning to delegate the little one out, while she pursues her plan for world domination and a flat stomach.

Because Beyoncé appears determined to ensure that having a baby will be simply be a footnote on her glittering cv. She says: "I am starting my company, my label. I want to create a boyband. I want to continue to produce and do documentaries and music videos." I say: ha!

But she’s not alone: the French Justice minister Rachida Dati returned to work in 2009, five days after giving birth to a child by C-section. Five weeks later, she lost her job, when the prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy dispatched her to Europe.

But amusing though the vanity and delusions of celebrity mothers-to-be undoubtedly are, there are some dangerous myths being circulated in the pages of showbiz magazines which need to be addressed.

Firstly, dirty nappies never smell good. Secondly, being pregnant and having small babies is wonderful and life-affirming - but it’s also tiring, frequently nauseating and almost always boring for everyone not directly involved (and often for those who are.)

And third, unless you opt for the ‘push-nip-tuck’ package at your local hospital, or are in fact Heidi Klum, shrinking back to your pre-pregnancy shape within weeks of giving birth is usually a sign that you’re suffering from such crippling postnatal depression that you can’t eat. It’s not a thing to be aimed for.

Surveys conducted in Britain have found that it takes, on average, 22 months for your body to return to its pre-pregnancy state.* (*Surveys conducted in my house have established that it’s more like five years and counting.)

Ninety seven per cent of women are not happy with the body they are left with after giving birth, while the other three per cent can be founding grinning smugly from the pages of Hello! and Okay magazines.

Three quarters of women surveyed went so far as to say they were “shocked” by the changes to their body. Six in ten said their sex life had suffered.

And then there’s all the other shocks celebrities don’t talk about (probably because, with a team of nannies and personal assistants, they know nothing about them).

There’s the crushing loss of identity suffered by many new mothers; the relentless nature of caring for a newborn; the toll sleep deprivation takes on your relationship, your looks, your ability to do simple arithmetic. Your ability to laugh.

Forget founding record labels, making documentaries and managing boybands, most days in that twilight zone of early motherhood, simply finding your car keys or managing to wash your hair would rank as a major accomplishment.

Having said all that, being pregnant and having babies are the most amazing things ever. You simply couldn’t imagine how wonderful it all is. And don’t get me started on the smell of their nappies first thing in the morning…

This column first appeared in the Irish Independent Weekend magazine on October 8, 2011

Childcare isn't just a woman's problem - it's a human problem

2011-08-29T13:07:00.001+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell

It’s not as though any working parent will have been surprised by the controversial ruling of US Judge Loretta A. Preska last week.

Finding against a group of mothers who had taken a discrimination suit against their employer, Bloomberg, she concluded that: “Making a decision that preferences family over work comes with consequences.”

Well, yes. If you’ve ever tried ironing on name-tags whilst taking part in a conference call, or have perfected the fine art of replying to emails while cooking spaghetti, you know what she’s talking about.

Photo by Ed Yourdon on Flickr via creative commons

If you’ve felt the eyes of a childless colleague boring through you as you’ve dashed for the exit to attend – yet again - to a sick toddler, or explained to a visibly unimpressed boss that 6pm really is a non-negotiable deadline for crèche pick-ups, you know all about the consequences that come with putting your family first.

But while it’s one thing recognising that an unfairness or an inequality exists, it’s quite another for a judge to come out and effectively rubber-stamp it.

Buried near the end of her 64 page ruling, which dismissed a claim by a group of mothers that Bloomberg routinely discriminated against pregnant women and those just returned from maternity leave, Preska appeared to wonder what these women expected when they went off and got themselves pregnant.

“The law does not mandate ‘work-life balance’. In a company like Bloomberg, which explicitly makes all-out dedication its expectation, making a decision that preferences family over work comes with consequences,” was her blunt assessment of the action - which included claims by some women that they were paid less when they returned from maternity leave, and others who said they were demoted and replaced by younger male employees.

Preska acknowledged that individuals who decide to spend more time with their families might face hurdles to advancement in the workplace. But what else did they expect?

“Even if there were several isolated instances of individual discrimination,” there was insufficient evidence to prove that discrimination was the company’s “standard operating procedure,” she concluded.

In pure legal terms, of course, Preska is right. As long as Bloomberg’s demands of its employees do not contravene the law, it’s entitled to expect them to confirm to its culture. And if that culture involves chanting ‘om’ at meetings, wearing yellow polka dot clown suits, or staying in the office until 2am, then they really don’t have a right to complain.

But her judgment strikes me as depressingly short-sighted.

As a working mother, I know all about the consequences that come with trying to juggle a demanding career and young children. And rarely, in my experience, is it the job that suffers.

I’ve seen firsthand the lengths that working parents of both genders go to, precisely to ensure that their employer is not short-changed: the mother of newborn twins who asked a colleague to deliver an important file to her bed on the recovery ward; the father who regularly stays up til midnight catching up on work he missed so he could be home to put his children to bed; the silent army whose day begins when the rest of the world is still asleep, because they’ve got to run just to stand still.

These same parents go to comparable lengths to ensure that their children don’t suffer either. Given a choice, it’s fair to assume that most children would opt to have both parents around all the time – at least until they reach the age when they’d prefer the company of your wallet and the number of a pizza delivery company.

But when that’s not possible, the majority of parents do their best to come up with a solution that ensures their children are as contented and well cared for as possible. Yes, there are lazy, work-shy people in every company, some of whom also happen to be parents. But does parenthood make otherwise dedicated employees lazy and work-shy? I doubt it.

Preska’s right of course: there are consequences. Something always has to give – usually that something is sleep and a social life.

The difficulty with deciding that there’s no such thing as a legal right to a work-life balance is that it may end up driving talented and educated women – and a growing minority of men – out of the workforce for good.

Sure, that’s one crude solution to the unemployment problem. But in a time of stagnant economic growth, falling consumer spending and a global debt crisis, we should be doing everything we can to hold onto talented, dedicated multi-taskers.

In her judgment, Preska wrote that: “A female employee is free to choose to dedicate herself to the company at any cost, and, so far as this record suggests, she will rise in this organization accordingly.”

Dedicate yourself to the job ‘at any cost’, and leave the repopulation of the human race to those with less important careers, seems to be the rather bleak conclusion.

After I wrote in these pages about my own struggle to find a work-life balance – a process which culminated in me leaving a job I was very fulfilled in, to return to a more precarious, but more flexible, career freelancing - many people contacted me to ask what I thought the solution was.

At the time, I felt that it had to come from a change in the culture of the workplace, and the willingness of employers to adopt more flexible working environments.

I still believe that’s the solution. But now I realise that nothing is going to happen until men demand it too.

Until fathers start taking up their parental leave entitlements; until their start insisting on the right to leave work at 5.30pm to pick up the kids; until they look for days off when one of their children is sick, the culture will never change.

Every child has two parents. We need to stop seeing the responsibility for their care as a woman’s problem, and start seeing it as a human problem.

This article first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on August 28, 2011

I'm not fussy. Any rich man will do

2011-08-21T13:19:00.000+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

As it’s August - the time of year when real news stops for a while to allow us to properly debate which seventysomething man we’d most like to be president (I’m holding out for Pat Ingoldsby) - I’ve found myself with a bit of unexpected free time to ponder the important questions of the universe.

Do strawberries taste the same for everyone? Why is there something rather than nothing? Is Schrodinger’s cat alive or dead?

And then there’s the really big one – why should I give a toss about Pippa Middleton?

No, wait! Don’t put the paper down. It may be silly season, but I would never stoop to gratuitous mentions merely to get another Pippa picture in the paper.

Photo by www.chicagofabulousblog.com

I genuinely want to know. Other than having a very shapely bottom, what exactly is it about Pippa Middleton that has inspired enough hand-rubbing amongst newspaper editors worldwide to light up the city of Beijing for at least a year?

According to a Google search, the name ‘Pippa’ has been mentioned in 1,270 news articles worldwide in the past month alone. Spend a few hours trawling them (you might as well, it’s August) and you’ll come away … well, not terribly much enriched.

The Hindustan Times records that: “Pippa kisses beau during cricket match”; the Guardian wonders: “Can Pippa Middleton, a retro Sloane who dresses as if she's been raised in the pages of Tatler, be a bona fide style icon?”; the Metro brings us the startling news that “Pippa’s £40,000 BMW sports car clamped in Chelsea”; while Us magazine gets straight to the nub of the matter: “Did Pippa Middleton pad her butt at the royal wedding?”

Meanwhile, children are starving in Somalia.

But sneer though we might – I know I’m starting to resemble a blonder Simon Cowell here – Pippa Middleton has arrived as a bona fide celebrity, a strange kind of (particularly shapely) cultural barometer and, yes, a role model for younger girls.

The Telegraph reported last weekend that the ‘Pippa Butt-Lift’ has become one of the most sought-after plastic surgery products in the US. Meanwhile, back on planet earth, I could count on one thumb the number of press releases which have arrived into my in-box not invoking the name ‘Pippa’ in recent months.

In the noughties, we worried about the kind of role models Victoria Beckham and Kate Moss made for young women – but at least they earned their own money, and spent their time doing things a little more enterprising than attending endless tennis and cricket matches or shopping in Chelsea.

Kate Moss may have smoked too many fags, eaten too little food and hung around with too many unsuitable men, but you couldn’t have called her bland. And while Victoria Beckham has never mastered the art of looking like she can stand being alive, she is – at least - driven.

Her brand of set-jawed, sharp-elbowed ambition is in sharp in contrast to the Pippas of this world, whose sole aim in life seems to be to find a rich man to marry. Oh yes, I know she has a job at her parents’ company, but that’s about as convincing a cover as sister Kate’s former career as a ‘buyer for Jigsaw’.

When I was a teenager in the 1990s, some of today’s most popular career choices simply didn’t exist.

I never knew anyone who replied “famous” or “on television”, for instance, when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. We’d have been less confused if they’d declared a lifelong ambition to work in the field of colonic irrigation.

And while I’m not naïve enough to think that at least some of my schoolmates didn’t really mean ‘married to a rich man’ when they answered with an unenthusiastic ‘nurse’ or teacher’, they at least had the sense not to say it aloud.

But the arrival into the public consciousness of the Middleton sisters has made it possible for the current crop of Harriet Smiths and Jane Fairfaxes to wobble out of the closet in their 6in Louboutins, fluttering their falsies at the nearest wallet.

Because marriage has once again become a perfectly acceptable career path.

Last week, I found myself watching a BBC3 documentary, Cherry’s Cash Dilemmas, in which one pretty teenager called Esma, growing up on a council estate, was asked what she wanted to be when she finished growing up. “A wag,” was her prompt reply.

Seeing the journalist’s look of astonishment, she added something like: “But it doesn’t have to be to a footballer. I’m not fussy. Any rich man will do.”

She wasn’t just sitting around in her bedroom, daydreaming about being a Wag, either. She and her friends were putting serious time and effort into their chosen career path: spending all their money on fake nails, fake hair and fake tan, and putting in a grueling round of nightclub appearances in the hopes of happening on a real-life footballer.

As a parent of members of the next generation of teenagers, I despair about the kind of role models they’ll be exposed to.

Since my daughter is just five, it’s still quite easy to point her in the right direction. Although she’d probably – just about – be able to cope with the literary demands of Jordan’s biography, it’s not about to find its own way onto her bookshelf.

So at the moment, her idol is Rosa Parks – mainly because they share a name and she would never give up her seat on the bus for a mean boy.

However, she’s also been watching a lot of Barbie movies, and so she would like it better if, once she’d finished being the mother of the freedom movement, Rosa had ended up married to a prince – or, at the very least, had a sister who married a prince.

I’d better start saving for the butt-lift.

This column first appeared in the Sunday Business Post on August 21, 2011

Italy's long holiday may be about to come to an abrupt end

2011-08-14T13:27:00.000+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

The elderly woman stood in her doorway, filling the street with the anxious sounds of the TV set blaring in the corner, and the aroma from the pot of minestrone bubbling on the stove behind her.

But she wasn’t worried about lunch: for once, she had some more universal problems on her mind.

“In Italia é la miseria,” she declared, throwing her arms open wide and gesturing to the sunny courtyard and the spectacular mountains beyond, as if some clue to the mysterious financial problems gripping her country might be found in the pots of gently nodding geraniums.

“La miseria!”

In six weeks in this country, this was the first – and last - conversation I’d had about the financial crisis.

The most serious drama yet to face the eurozone may be playing out here, but you’d never know it. In restaurants and on the beach, the same preoccupations that have always existed continue, on the surface at least, to exercise the hordes of Italian holidaymakers: food, the unseasonably cold weather, Berlusconi’s peccadilloes, and whether that foreigner with the skinny, pale children has heard of suncream.

But you don’t have to look far for evidence of how Italy’s business culture might have contributed to the mess that’s now threatening to destabilise the currency, and recently wiped 11 per cent off the value of shares worldwide in the space of a fortnight.

Shops are shuttered up, with the unapologetic “Chiuso per le ferie” signs that traditionally go up in their windows in August.

And it’s not just shopowners who have taken to the beach for the month: on the day Berlusconi announced that austerity targets would be accelerated by 12 months to 2013, members of his cabinet listened were preparing to head for their holidays, prompting the leftwing daily Il Fatto Quotidiano to note that “to speak about the most serious crisis in the past 20 years in front of members of parliament with their suitcases packed, more concentrated on their holidays than on servicing the public debt, gives the image of a political class that is blissfully ignorant.”

Photo by Jimmy Harris on Flickr via creative commons

In a meagre nod to the crisis that has seen share values plunge and borrowing costs rise to unsustainable levels, Italian lawmakers agreed to return from their holidays six days early – but that means they still won’t be back until September 6.

Meanwhile, that mood of blissful ignorance extends beyond Rome. As the country’s economic future hung precariously in the balance, life continued as normal elsewhere: the shops that haven’t closed for the whole month follow the same erratic hours they do for the rest of the year.

In this part of Tuscany, that means they close on Monday mornings, and for three or four hours in the middle of the day, drawing down the shutters again for the evening at 7pm. In one small, outwardly prosperous town near to where we’re staying, the daily lunch break runs from 1pm until 5pm.

With small businesses employing just 15 people making up the bulk of the country’s economy, the problem is about more than where to buy a loaf of bread in the afternoon.

The family-run firms that were responsible for the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s and 60s have become an albatross around the country’s neck, as they struggle to modernise and compete in a global economy.

Real GDP is expected to grow by a paltry 1 per cent this year, and 1.3 per cent in 2012 – nowhere near enough to put a dent in its staggering debt of €1.8 trillion.

And you don’t have to be an economist to work out where at least part of the problem lies: in restaurants away from the main resorts, the process of asking for the bill invariably involves a waiter leaning close to your ear and invoking some neat, round figure, or surreptitiously passing you a piece of folded paper with a single, scrawled amount written inside. Itemised bills with VAT included are as rare as rainy days in July.

Italy, unlike Ireland and Spain, was not derailed by a property crash: under Berlusconi’s leadership, the boom years simply passed it by. According to media reports last week, the only countries with lower levels of economic growth over the 10 years up to 2010 were Zimbabwe and Haiti.

Unemployment levels, at just over 8 per cent, are below average for Europe, but conversely, the country also has one of the lowest employment levels in the eurozone.

Fourteen per cent of the country’s GDP is dedicated to covering the cost of pensions. At the other end of the demographic spectrum, middle-class families are putting themselves into debt or selling off assets to subsidise their adult children, who are living at home because they can’t find jobs.

The notion that Italy – and the entire future of the eurozone – may now be relying on the mercurial Berlusconi, who has emphatically ruled out early elections, for its survival, is not a terribly cheering one.

At an emergency press conference held ten days ago, he continued to flash his trademark salesman’s grin, and said he did not expect more market turmoil ahead.

Asked what ordinary Italians should do, he urged them to put their money into Italian bonds or – even better - shares in one of his own companies.

Unless his boundless self-confidence proves sufficiently contagious, Italy’s long holiday may be about to come to an abrupt end.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on August 14, 2011

Wendi Deng: Shameless trophy wife or laudable feminist icon? Discuss

2011-07-31T13:29:00.000+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

In her amusing, no-holds-barred, polemic on modern womanhood, the journalist and author, Caitlin Moran, offers an instant guide to interpreting whether or not you are a feminist.

“Look inside your pants,” she counsels.

“Do you have a vagina? And do you want to be in charge of it?”

If you answered yes, she suggests, then you’re a feminist.

The book, How to Be A Woman, offers a useful navigation tool through all the big questions facing modern feminists: Burkhas, bitching, having children, hair removal, hiring domestic cleaners, pornography and £600 handbags.

It’s just a shame it went to press before she could offer an insight into the latest conundrum that tearing the feminist world asunder.

Were it to appear on a Leaving Cert History paper (and, at this juncture, that’s not entirely outside the bounds of possibility), it might be expressed as follows: Wendi Deng: Shameless trophy wife or laudable feminist icon? Discuss.

Tiger-wife Wendi roars to the defence of her husband, Rupert Murdoch

In the early days, of course, the evidence pointed incontrovertibly to the former.

When it was announced in 1999 that the ageing media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, was about to marry a young Chinese executive - a mere 17 days after his divorce from the wife some sections of the British media had dubbed ‘Saint Anna’ - I was commissioned to write something about it for this newspaper.

The article has been lost in the archives, but it’s likely to have contained around 850 words, which could probably have been more succinctly expressed as follows: “Wendi Deng. Trophy wife.”

In my defence, even Murdoch himself didn’t seem to expect too much more from his new bride at that stage. In a 1999 interview with Vanity Fair magazine, he emphatically ruled out her working for News Corp, insisting she was too "busy working on decorating the new apartment”.

It’s possible, of course, that he was just trying to mollify his children – Prudence, James, Elisabeth and Lachlan – who were understandably alarmed at the speed at which their mother had been replaced in their 68-year-old father’s affections.

But it’s equally conceivable that Murdoch himself had spectacularly underestimated Deng. When the Wall Street Journal published details of her epic rise from her humble beginnings as the daughter of a mid-ranking factory manager, Murdoch is said to have remarked: ‘I didn’t know half of that.’

The article recounted how, as a teenager, she was studying medicine and aching for a passport out of China, when she encountered an American couple, Jake and Joyce Cherry.

Deng persuaded the couple to agree to sponsor a student visa for her to the USA. No sooner had Joyce had got all the paperwork out of the way and made up a bed in her house for the then 19-year-old than Deng rewarded her by running off with her husband – a man 30 years her senior.

Jake Cherry’s marriage to Wendi Deng lasted just long enough for her to get her green card, before he discovered she was having an affair with someone else.

Armed with a divorce cert and an MBA from Yale University, Deng got a job with Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV in 1996. Two years later, she was assigned to act as his interpreter during a trip to China. A year after that, they were married.

Admittedly, she’s not the most obvious candidate for feminist iconhood. But long before the pie-throwing incident two weeks ago, observers had been speculating that there was more to Wendi Deng than mere trophy wife.

Far from spending her time wrapped up in soft furnishings, the now mother-of-two is chief strategist for MySpace in China, and co-founder and chief executive of the film company, Big Feet Productions.

In his biography of Murdoch, Michael Wolff wrote: "Let's recast this story as a triumphal, even uplifting tale of pluck and achievement. She's not [the cynical social-climbing heroine of Vanity Fair] Becky Sharp, she's Pip in Great Expectations."

But it was at the House of Commons hearing into the phone hacking scandal earlier this month that Deng pulled off the swiftest rehabilitation of a public figure ever seen outside the doors of the Priory.

Leaping to her feet, like a tiger launching herself at her kill, she managed to land a loud slap on the head of Jonnie Marbles, the pie-throwing comedian who had targeted her husband, while Murdoch’s security staff were still sitting around wondering what they’d have for lunch.

The transformation in the public perception of her was instant. Newspapers – including even a few not owned by her husband - praised her “dignity and self-discipline” and her “genuine affection” for Murdoch. The Channel 4 news anchor Jon Snow tweeted: "Wendi heroic protector of fading old genius”, while journalist John Hildebrand added: "At last the News of the World enquiry has exposed News Corps deepest darkest secret. Wendi Deng is a Power Ranger."

Chinese commentators were even more effusive: the woman who had once been portrayed as a distinctly unChinese, marriage-wrecking gold-digger became a "tiger woman"; a "Charlie's Angel".

In a Sina Weibo poll, about 70 per cent of respondents said they cheered for her, 20 per cent said the incident had completely changed their mind about her, and just 10 per cent said they still believed she is a manipulative woman whom they "dislike".

Feminism, of course, is not about bravely standing by your man, Tammy Wynette style, nor is it necessarily about being able to land a swift right hook on the man attempting to cover your ageing husband in synthetic custard foam.

But if it is essentially about the credo that, as Caitlin Moran says, “women should be as free as men” – as free to marry whomever they like for whatever reason they like; as free to ruthlessly climb the career and social ladders; as free to choose whether to be an obedient Stepford spouse or an ambitious executive; as free to land a slap on the head of annoying would-be comedians - then Deng ticks all the boxes.

And somehow – as James Murdoch becomes deeper and deeper emmeshed in the phone hacking scandal – I have the feeling she’s only getting started.

If she can go from trophy wife to feminist icon in one swift uppercut, who knows what’s next for Wendi Deng?

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on July 31, 2011

Let's get this psychopathic institution out of our schools

2011-07-24T14:57:00.000+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

Psychopaths can be surprisingly good company. Typically, they have a high degree of superficial charm, and an over-inflated sense of self-worth. They tend to suffer from grandiosity, and have unrealistic expectations of life.

Psychopaths also have very little empathy, or none at all. They get bored easily, and so they tend to graduate towards the bright lights of big towns.

Psychopaths are peculiarly well suited to corporate life: they can thrive in big organisations where ruthlessness and an ability to manipulate others are highly valued.

Photo by neshuma on Flickr via creative commons

Psychopaths are often sexually promiscuous. They are usually pathological liars, who are reluctant to take responsibilities for their actions. They are criminally versatile – willing to turn their hands to many types of crime. And they don’t learn from their mistakes – around 60 per cent of criminal psychopaths go on to reoffend when they’re released from prison.

It’s thought roughly one per cent of the population is psychoapthic, but the chaotic influence they wield far exceeds this.

I learned all this while reading the British author Jon Ronson’s compelling The Psychopath Test, in which he explores the madness industry generally – and Robert Hare’s famous checklist for signs of psychopathy particularly.

The trouble with reading a book like The Psychopath Test is that you start to see psychopaths everywhere. As I read the book on the beach, I looked up from my lounger: suddenly a beautiful summer’s day on the Mediterranean seemed fraught with danger. Was that man striding about in his Speedos, barking instructions into a mobile phone, really just a high-powered executive finding it difficult to wind down on holidays?

In the bar, where I had lunch, the owner slammed my salad down on the table and moaned about how stressed he was, how hard he has to work. I immediately assessed him for “proneness to boredom” and a “grandiose sense of self worth”.

I promised myself I would stop seeing psychopaths everywhere.

And then I read the Cloyne report.

I read, with a chilling sense of deja-vu, how priests had abused children with impunity, and how Church seniors had, once again, tripped over themselves in their eagerness to protect their own.

I read how the diocese of Cloyne failed to report nine of out 15 serious complaints made between 1999 and 2005.

I read how a priest described as ‘Father Flan’ had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old girl – but that it was only after he eloped with a married woman that Monsignor O’Callaghan (whose job it was to report abuse claims to the authorities) decided in hindsight that he should have “gone straight to the gardaí” with the initial complaint.

I read how a national school principal was so concerned about the safety of her pupils when a priest whose behaviour had given rise to concern and rumour, “Father Calder” was appointed school chairman, that she refused to let a number of small boys take time off to attend confession – at which point Father Calder reminded her who was paying her wages. The report states that “he told her that he could refuse to sign her salary form if she was not obeying the Rules for National Schools by not complying with his requests as chairman.”

When she took her complaint to Monsignor O’Callaghan, he retorted that she was “anti-homosexual”.

I read how Bishop John Magee compiled “deliberately misleading” reports of his interview with a priest who admitted abusing a 16-year-old boy; and how Monsignor O’Callaghan decided that a priest “petting” and “fondling” a naked nine-year-old girl was mere “over-familiarity”, rather than abuse.

And I read how the Papal Nuncio refused to assist the Commission in its investigation; how the Vatican described the guidelines on reporting child abuse allegations to the civil authorities as 'merely a study document'.

Photo by _Gavroche_ on Flickr via creative commons

Wading through yet another grim catalogue of abuse and cover-up, I suddenly saw how the Church is an organisation in which a psychopath might expect to prosper. And then I had another thought.

As an institution, the Catholic Church’s conduct throughout the abuse scandal has shown behaviour that a psychiatrist would probably diagnose as consistent with psychopathy.

Through the Ferns, Murphy, Ryan, and now the Cloyne report, a few features have remained consistent: the lack of empathy for the victims; the grandiose refusal to recognise, or abide by, civil laws; and the pathological lying, promiscuity and recidivism on the part of the abusers.

Systematically, victims were abused, bullied, manipulated and stripped of their dignity by their abusers, and then ignored, manipulated and stripped of their dignity by the authorities. Alleged abusers were protected, covered up for – and in one case detailed in Cloyne, offered a promotion as parish priest.

Incredibly, this is the organisation to whom we continue to entrust the education and care of the vast majority of our most precious and vulnerable citizens: our children.

The very same bishops who repeatedly put the well-being of abusers ahead of the protection of children – the same bishops who showed such lack of empathy for abused and such contempt for civil law - have direct control of 90 per cent of our national schools.

For parents like me, parents of children who will be entered the national school system for the first time in a few short weeks, it’s comforting to think that bishops no longer exert the control they once did; that their influence on our children’s education these days is symbolic only.

It’s comforting – but it’s not actually accurate.

As the documentary-maker Mary Raftery pointed out recently: “One has only to look at a number of court rulings which state unambiguously that it is school boards (and the patron bishops who appoint them) who are in law wholly responsible for the safety of our children in school. The State has been found to have zero legal responsibility.”

As I read the report, one sentence kept coming back to me: “He reminded her who was paying her wages”.

In fact, it’s you and I and every other taxpayer who pays teachers’ wages. The notion that a principal acting in the best interests of child protection could be threatened by a priest – a priest whose behaviour around young men had given rise to serious concern – is chilling. And yet, in legal terms, he was right: the principal is answerable in law to the chairman of the board of management.

We are the ones who offloaded the responsibility for the education of our children onto the Church: now we must be the ones to demand it back.

Lets get this psychopathic institution out of our schools.

This column was first published in The Sunday Business Post on July 24, 2011

My presentation to the Dublin Web Summit about TheJournal.ie

2011-06-29T12:13:00.001+01:00

On the web, no-one knows you're a dog

2011-06-20T12:18:00.000+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell

On the internet, as New Yorker magazine once said, no one knows you’re a dog.

Or, perhaps more pertinently, no one knows you’re a middle-aged American man with an unhealthy fascination for the private lives of lesbians.

Just ask the readers of LezGetReal, an enormously popular lesbian blog, whose editor ‘Paula Brooks’ admitted last week she’s actually Bill Graber, a 58-year-old retired military man.

Or ask Jelena Lecic, the Croatian born Londoner who woke up one day recently to find herself splashed all over the websites of the Guardian, the Washington Post and the Huffington Post, alongside an account of the abduction of a lesbian blogger in Syria she’d never heard of.

Or ask the unfortunate teenager from the west of Ireland who was maliciously accused of cheating in her Junior Cert exam by one of her classmates in a Facebook status update that went viral last week.

Everyone who uses the internet regularly knows that much of what you find in cyberspace comes with a health warning. It’s part of the silent, unwritten contract you make when you log on. You start from the premise that everyone else might be of canine persuasion, and then you simply get on with it.

You log onto Twitter in the knowledge that the 30-year-old guy who tweets funny things his 80-year-old dad says may not have a dad. Or be a guy. But it doesn’t stop you enjoying his tweets.

You use Wikipedia regularly, but you realise that while it might be a useful tool for sorting out rows that break out in the pub, you know you wouldn’t want to rely on it in an exam. Or a newspaper article.

What makes people make stuff up on the internet? It’s a bit like what explorer George Mallory said when he was asked why he wanted to climb Everest. ‘‘Because it’s there," was his reply.

People lie online simply because they can. It probably starts out as a small deception: a harmless exercise in fiction writing.

Then they do it again, and they start to get noticed. Nobody questions them, and they realise they can say anything they like and it won’t be challenged. And suddenly they’re hooked. And even if they start to have second thoughts, once the lie is out there, there’s no pulling it back.

I doubt - or at least I hope it is the case - that Tom MacMaster, the middle aged American living in Scotland who was unmasked last week as the man responsible for the hoax Gay Girl in Damascus blog, had any idea what would happen when he posted his first blog post as ‘Amina Arraf’, a 35-year-old Syrian-American, living with her father in Damascus, last February.

I doubt he thought about the consequences of invading Jelena Lecic’s privacy by trawling through her Facebook account and stealing her photographs to give his creation a face, complete with the distinctive mole over her left eyebrow.

And when he couldn’t take the pressure any more and decided to ‘‘kill her off’’ last week, he certainly didn’t set out to endanger the lives of the activists in Syria who risked their own safety investigating the fictional account - posted a fortnight ago by a ‘‘cousin of Amina’s’’ - of her abduction.

He probably didn’t think too hard either about the man hours he was wasting in newsrooms around the world as they reported on an abduction that never happened; or about the fact that while reporters were busy covering Amina’s plight, they were distracted from real events happening in Syria.

Predictably, much soul-searching went on in the media last week when it was revealed that the spirited lesbian commentator and would-be poet, who had occupied so many column and screen inches across so many publications, had never existed.

‘‘There’s no doubt that MacMaster expended an enormous amount of effort compiling the blog and creating Gay Girl’s persona: poems, long, imaginary reminiscences - even warning readers to treat some other websites ‘with a very large grain of salt’ - but to what purpose?" the Guardian wondered. ‘‘Why on earth would a married man in Scotland pretend to be a lesbian living in Damascus?"

MacMaster published an account of his reasons last week, but while it’s long on sorries, it’s unsurprisingly short on actual motivation.

He did it, it seems, for no more noble reason than he could. MacMaster’s rather painful mea culpa ends with a direct apology to Jelena Lecic and Paula Brooks.

But in a twist no one could possibly have predicted, the same Paula Brooks - editor of the LezGetReal website, which was the first to give Amina a platform - also turns out to have been the figment of another middle-aged man’s imagination.

Brooks, like Amina, had become a regular commentator in the US media, though she insisted she could only speak through her father on the phone because she was deaf.

So when Amina was outed as MacMaster, it was practically inevitable that the spotlight would turn to Graber.

He insists the connection between the two men was coincidental: ‘‘It was a major sock-puppet hoax crash into a major sock-puppet hoax."

Meanwhile, in Ireland, another - less ambitious but no less sinister - online hoax was playing out.

A group of students in the west of Ireland hijacked another student’s Facebook page and made completely untrue accusations of cheating against a girl doing her Junior Cert.

Within hours, the student’s name, alongside the allegation that she had ‘‘cheatd in her jc’’ by hiding notes in her hoodie, became a trending topic on Twitter, and the accusations - which were without any foundation whatsoever - were brought to the attention of the State Examination Commission and investigated by journalists.

There is, of course, a lesson in all of this for the media, and it can probably be summed up in three words: check your sources. But there’s a lesson in it for the rest of us as well.

Lying on the internet, as someone once said, is like peeing in a pool. Once it’s out there, there’s no getting it back.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on Sunday June 19, 2011

Photo by Hakan Dahlstroms on Flickr

Why aren't there more women in the media?

2011-06-18T14:11:00.001+01:00

About a month ago, I was asked to contribute to a debate organised by the National Women's Council entitled "Women in the media - Not!".

Here, in two parts, is my contribution, which later formed the basis of this column about the difficulties of juggling a 24/7 career in the media with family life for The Sunday Business Post.

Could this be the most awful ad ever made?

2011-06-18T13:53:00.001+01:00

For once, words defy me.

(Thanks to @finianmurphy and @niamhpitts for bringing it to my attention.)

A letter to my daughter

2011-06-14T12:11:00.001+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell

Dear daughter: I wanted to write you a note of apology for the ways in which my generation has so dismally failed yours. Right now - through your four year-old eyes - the world is an uncomplicated place.

When you grow up, you confidently assert, you’re going to be an astronaut, an artist, or a washing machine lady. You love your little brother, but mainly you pity him because of his gender. "One day, you’ll be big like me," you tell him. "But you’ll never be as big as me.

"And" - you sigh sadly, "you’ll still be a boy." You are, indisputably, the chief executive of the playroom, the chief operations officer and the board of management.

Trying to convey to you right now that the world might not always work like this would be like trying to explain string theory.

We had a conversation once about a country called Saudi Arabia where women are not allowed to drive cars.

You stared at me, saucer-eyed. ‘‘But who won’t let them?" you demanded to know, incredulous at the concept of that omnipotent being - a ‘Mummy’ - being told what to do by anyone.

By the time you’re in your teens, you’ll have realised that life is a bit more complicated than that.

You’ll have encountered the concept of feminism, but if you’re anything like today’s generation of teenagers - loud and confident and surging ahead - you will quickly conclude that it has nothing to offer you.

Eighteen years from now, when you’re probably embarking on a career, you might start to notice a few things that jar with your determinedly feminocentric view of the world.

You might observe that it’s invariably your female colleagues with children who have to rush off out of the office at 5pm, or who take time off when their children are sick, or who work part time.

You will have female bosses, but - I’d bet - still not at the top echelons of the organisation.

Even if women have begun to catch up, I doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that in your mother’s time, 70 per cent of managerial roles were held by men - because, generally, being a manager requires someone to work full time, and unless they find some way for men to have babies by the time you grow up, that’s not going to change.

The concept of paternity leave might not be such an outlandishly alien one; but I bet for every week a new Dad takes off work when a baby’s born, his partner will still take four or five months.

Same sex couples will be having or adopting babies together and doing their bit to challenge the stereotype, but in most families, as it is now, it’ll be the woman whose career goes on the back burner.

If things have changed at all, you might watch TV programmes documenting the start of the Great Depression - or, say, Reeling in the Years for 2010 - and find yourself wondering where all the women were.

You’ll look at the TV programmes of men rushing importantly out of bank headquarters and government buildings, and you’ll ask yourself ‘Where were all the women bankers?’

You’ll look at archive footage of panels on quaint-seeming current affairs shows earnestly discussing the Anglo fallout (let’s assume for our purposes here that you won’t still be looking at current TV programmes discussing the Anglo fallout) and you’ll wonder what the women of the country thought about the decision to pass on thousands of euro worth of banking debt to you, and your brother, and all your friends, when you probably each had less than €1 saved up in your porcelain piggy banks.

You’ll definitely have had a few female presidents in your lifetime; you might even have had a female taoisigh - a Joan Burton, or a Lucinda Creighton - but it’s safe to assume men will still make up the majority of those in power.

Even with the dramatic advances in life expectancy, you’re unlikely to live to see gender equality in the Dáil - the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) calculates that could take 370 years.

The male politicians will, of course still be insisting this is a product of women’s ‘choices’ or a question of their ‘priorities’.

Given that recent figures in Britain suggest the gender pay gap there at management level is going to take 57 years to close - and here it’s at a staggering 17 per cent - you’re likely to notice at some point that you’re being paid less than the men in your organisation to do the same job.

The EU will hopefully be tackling this on your behalf - only this week, the French government announced plans to penalise companies that pay female workers less than men, as part of a package of pension reform. But given the state of the economy we have bequeathed you, I think it’s fair to assume that equal pay is not going to be top of any agenda here, any time soon.

As Susan McKay of the NWCI points out: ‘‘In 2007, the Irish government launched a National Women’s Strategy, claiming it would present a ‘shining light to the world’.

"Last year, they took an axe to its funds, claiming that with prisoners to house, garda overtime to pay, and asylum seekers to feed, they just couldn’t afford it."

If you have children of your own at some point, you’ll find it mostly stops being about choice - and becomes about the lack of it.

The lack of choice of affordable childcare; the lack of choice to go part time; the lack of choice of flexible career opportunities.

So this is my way of saying sorry in anticipation.

I’m sorry that we will have achieved so little on your behalf - other than a personal debt of God-knows-how manythousand-euro in the name of our government and a mortgage you might have to help us pay off.

My mother’s generation made the world an infinitely better place to be a woman in; you, I’m ashamed to concede, probably won’t be able to say the same about mine. If anything, we have limited your choices and contracted your freedom.

But I can say with some confidence I speak for many mothers and fathers when I tell you this: we are seething with anger about what our generation has done to yours.

We are fuming. And if we could just find someone to mind you for an hour, we’d probably even storm the Dáil.

If your future self will take a piece of advice from me - and if she’s anything like your present self, she won’t - it’s this: emigrate. Right now, I reckon the best thing I can do to make things up to you is to start teaching you Chinese.

A version of this column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on September 19, 2010.

@twitter/offmessagejen

Gratuitous female nudity is the marketing world’s equivalent of spag bol for supper

2011-06-13T20:41:00.000+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell

I’ll say this for much modern advertising: it doesn’t discriminate. It makes idiots of us all.

Yes, it turns women into over-sharing, unthreatening twits, desperately trying to navigate a terrifying world of bowel problems, unfluffy laundry and stubbly bikini lines.

But that’s all right, because it makes men look stupid too, transforming them into gurning fools who struggle to complete the most unchallenging of household tasks, believe deodorant makes them sexually attractive, and strut about town offering unsolicited advice to strangers on mortgages and broadband.

However, there’s still one critical difference between how men and women are portrayed in advertising and PR campaigns.

While the men in Ad World also get to drive fast cars, drink beer, chat up women and go on fly-fishing expeditions with their mates, women, when we’re not being mere idiots, get to take our clothes off.

We get to stand buck-naked in a field of wheat to advertise a product for gingivitis; we get to get our bum cheeks out on a rugby pitch to advertise a brand of crisps; we get to take off all our other clothes to make sure you notice how lovely our watch is.

Gratuitous female nudity is the marketing world’s equivalent of spag bol for supper. It’s the lazy choice, the cheap and easy staple.

When you really can’t think of a single good reason why anybody would actually want to buy your client’s product, you simply pay a nice-looking girl to stand beside it, in it or on it, wearing as few clothes as possible, and hope passers-by will stare long enough to notice the brand name.

A recent American Psychological Association (APA) report highlights how widespread the objectification of women is in the media: ‘‘In study after study, findings have indicated that women more often than men are portrayed in a sexual manner (eg dressed in revealing clothing, with bodily postures or facial expressions that imply sexual readiness) and are objectified (eg used as a decorative object, or as body parts rather than a whole person). In addition, a narrow (and unrealistic) standard of physical beauty is heavily emphasized."

The sexualisation of women doesn’t stop at women either: in recent years, little girls have been targeted.

An ad campaign by Gap earlier this year highlighting the different styles of jeans available for kids showed a little girl of seven or eight standing on her tippy toes, and leaning back to apparently get a better look at her bum.

The jean styles for children are the same as for adults, and include the ‘skinny’ and the ‘super skinny’.

The APA study concluded that advertising which sexualised women and children in this way is not just lazy and offensive: it has potentially serious psychological implications, from a heightened self-awareness in girls which can lead to an impaired ability to concentrate, to ‘‘eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression or depressed mood [and] diminished sexual health’’.

But it wasn’t just girls who were damaged by it: ‘‘exposure to narrow ideals of female sexual attractiveness may make it difficult for some men to find an ‘‘acceptable’’ partner or to fully enjoy intimacy with a female partner."

The British government this week approved a range of new measures to curb the sexualisation and commercialisation of children in the media, while a number of retailers agreed to ‘good practice’ guidelines which would include a ban on the sale of inappropriate clothing to children - such as the now-famous padded bra for six-year-olds.

But while this move is welcome, the media furore over padded bras has detracted from the wider issue - the offensive and reductive nature of so much marketing and advertising aimed at women.

If certain sections of the Irish PR industry have read the APA’s report at all, then they seem to have taken it not as a warning but as a recommendation, so married are they to the Carry On school of marketing.

A particularly memorable recent effort featured a man dressed as a giant red pepper being pursued through a damp St Stephen’s Green by three models in bikinis. I haven’t got a clue what it was supposed to publicise, but it’ll be a long time before I manage to delete the image from my internal hard-drive.

But despite all this, there are some companies which you might expect would resist the urge to reduce women to the sum total of their body parts, or to espouse what the APA calls one ‘‘narrow and unrealistic standard of beauty’’.

Unislim, a company which promotes ‘‘a sensible approach to healthy eating’’, and which uses real role models and actual slimming stories to inspire its members, is one from which you might be forgiven for hoping for a more imaginative approach.

And yet very recently, a picture landed in my inbox from Unislim’s recent promotional campaign with Eddie Rocket’s. It wasn’t that the image itself was particularly offensive or unusually crass: the giant red pepper has the copyright on that.

In this case, it was more about the troubling message the campaign sent out. It featured a very thin model wearing a tiny red bikini and six inch heels posing awkwardly in the middle of an Eddie Rocket’s outlet as she pretended to take a bite out of a so called ‘‘bikini burger’’.

What kind of message does an image like this send out to the women who are working hard to achieve a healthy weight, but won’t ever have a 26 inch waist? (And let’s not even get into the wisdom of promoting burgers as a healthy choice.)

The answer, of course, is that the PR campaign wasn’t designed with Unislim’s own members in mind - the bikini photos never made it onto the Unislim website.

Rather, it was aimed at the sections of the mainstream media for whom ‘‘newsworthy’’ very often means ‘‘accompanied by an attractive woman sporting beachwear in an inappropriate setting’’.

I derived some temporary pleasure From the discovery that Ryanair had recently been banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority over an ad campaign featuring yet another bikini-clad model, who was there for no very good reason other than she was wearing a bikini.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the gratuitous semi-nudity itself wasn’t the problem.

Rather, it was the suggestion that the destinations featured in the ad (Rimini, Lourdes, Derry, Glasgow and Oslo) would be hot enough for a bikini in early spring, when in fact that they would be a chilly ten degrees or lower. Oh well.

You’ve got to start somewhere.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on Sunday June 12, 2011.

twitter.com/jenoconnell

I'm in the grip of a dangerous new epidemic: it's called irritation with Safefood

2011-05-30T20:32:00.002+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell

Jonny Sexton: hardly an unhealthy role model

We’re all in the grip of a new epidemic. Most of us already have it, and we’re rapidly passing it on to others.

You can check if you have also been infected by taking the following steps. Find a radio.

Turn it on. Wait until you hear the latest health information ad by Safefood (don’t worry, it won’t take that long).

Feel your hackles rising? Your blood pressure soaring? Is your grammar radar going into overdrive? Do you feel an uncontrollable urge to seize the nearest cream bun and jam it furiously into your mouth?

If you answered yes to just one of those questions, then I’m afraid you’ve got it too. It’s called irritation with Safefood and its silly ad campaigns.

I first noticed the signs last year, when Safefood ran its offensive and deeply patronising Little Steps campaign, which I wrote about in these pages. Its latest campaign has achieved what I would have said a year ago was impossible: it’s even worse.

The ad, if you’ve been lucky enough not to have heard it, suggests that there’s a dangerous new health epidemic gripping the nation. ‘‘It’s called overweight."

A solemn-voiced narrator urges people to measure their ‘‘true’’ waist to see if they are overweight. If it’s 32 inches or more for a woman, and 37 inches or more for a man, then ‘‘it probably has spread to you’’.

There is so much wrong and damaging in this ad, it’s difficult to know where to start.

Let’s begin with the aspects that are merely wrong. In the first place, ‘‘overweight’’ is not, and has never been, a noun. Neither is it, or has it ever been, something that can be transmitted in the manner of a virus.

Gaining weight is not something that can be ‘‘rapidly passed on’’ - it is a process that happens gradually, which is one of the factors that contributes to our collective denial about it. In fact, if you were to go to bed one night skinny and wake up fat - in the manner in which you might come down suddenly with a dose of the flu - then you’d have far greater health problems to worry about.

But those are minor quibbles beside the gaping, screaming flaw in Safefood’s logic: the suggestion that a waist measurement alone can give an indication of health, or that everyone should wear the same size jeans.

Safefood insists that the measurements are based on World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations of healthy sizes for men and women. In fact, they’re not - the WHO says 80 centimetres is a healthy measurement for a woman, which is 31.5 inches.

The WHO website also points out that the best measure of whether you’re overweight is body mass index (BMI), but says even that is a ‘‘crude’’ and a ‘‘rough’’ measure of your health.

Yes, it’s true that weight which accumulates on the abdomen has greater health implications than weight carried elsewhere.

But it still defies belief that, by Safefood’s estimation, six foot two-inch, 25-year-old Leinster rugby player Jonny Sexton is a very bad role model for younger men, or that any reputable health body would suggest that a 60 year-old mother of five should - or could - have the same waist measurement as an 18-year-old girl.

As a commenter called Joe points out on YouTube: ‘‘Having a 37-inch waist is not a ‘‘disease’’ nor an ‘‘epidemic’’, no matter what way you spin it. I’m worried about your obvious disdain for overweight people. I have a 37-inchwaist, a 46-inch chest, I play rugby and I run half-marathons. I weigh 17 stone and eat right.

"Your argument that a certain waistline implies you have a disease is absurd."

On the Safefood Facebook page, a young woman called Nathalie puts the chief flaw in this campaign into distressingly sharp focus: ‘‘I am a young woman of 20, I walk daily and eat healthy.

"My BMI is perfect, exactly in between the minimum and maximum. I have a 32-inch waist - which according to your ad means I am borderline [obese]. I’d like to point out that I’ve had problems with my health and weight in the past and came close to developing anorexia, it has taken years to reach what my doctor says is the healthy weight for me.

"[I] feel as though this ad is putting more pressure onto impressionable people to lose weight and is convincing perfectly healthy people that they are obese."

In response to Nathalie, Safefood says: ‘‘The campaign is clearly not aimed at you, but at the two out of three who are overweight on the island."

Where is it clearly not aimed at Nathalie, who appears to me from the TV ad, to represent precisely its target market?

The organisation concedes that ‘‘it is possible to have a normal BMI but have a waist size above the cut-off’’ - a point which seems to undermine its entire (expensive and publicly-funded) campaign.

The message, ‘‘Don’t stand near a fat person in case you get fat yourself’’ is so ridiculously crass and offensive as to be almost funny. But substitute the words ‘‘Traveller’’; ‘‘person with mental health problems’’; ‘‘black’’ or ‘‘gay’’ for ‘‘fat’ ’and it’s still stupid, but suddenly it’s not quite so hilarious.

Safefood has argued - again in response to criticism on its Facebook page - that ‘‘it chose to portray overweight as a ‘social’ contagion because research has shown that a person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57 per cent if he/she had a friend who became obese’’.

Well, I’m sorry but that’s yet more (expensive and publicly-funded) nonsense. No doubt peer influences play a very small part in people gaining or losing weight, just as peer influences play a part in determining where you choose to live, the brand of jeans you wear, or how much you drink.

But is social pressure really such a critical factor in Ireland’s weight problem that it merited a TV, radio and social media campaign costing tens of thousands of euro all on its own?

Wouldn’t it have been a far better use of taxpayers’ money to fund a campaign highlighting, say, the benefits of portion control, or unmasking all the so-called healthy foods like juices and yoghurt drinks - that are packed with sugar?

I’ll leave you to think about that while I go and find some rich and beautiful people to stand next to.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on May 29, 2011.

I'll be on the Eamon Dunphy Show tomorrow

2011-05-28T17:38:00.000+01:00

I'll be on the Eamon Dunphy show tomorrow morning - May 29 - on Newstalk, from 11am, talking the European debt crisis, Obama's visit, super-injunctions and whatever else the Sunday papers throw at us.

Listen to the programme here >

Photo by S Diddy on Flickr

Exciting line-up of brainiacs - and me - at Dublin web summit

2011-05-26T17:23:00.002+01:00

Yikes!

It looks like I've agreed to speak about the first year in the life of TheJournal at the Dublin Web Summit's summer barbecue on June 10.

There'll be burgers, beers and brainiacs. And then, of course, there's me.

So please do come along.

Book your tickets here.

Photo by perpetualplum on Flickr

It took me 15 years to land the perfect job - and just one to realise I no longer wanted it

2011-05-25T18:47:00.003+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell

In 1898, the British journalist Arnold Bennett - who would go on to become a celebrated novelist - published a guide for women journalists.

The second chapter of his pamphlet, which is still available to download free online, is entitled ‘Imperfections of the existing Woman-Journalist’.

‘‘Is there any sexual reason why a woman should be a less accomplished journalist than a man?" he wondered. ‘‘I can find none." And yet he suffered from no such shortage of evidence for the thesis that they were - quite spectacularly - less accomplished.

War correspondent Martha Gellhorn defied Bennett's stereotype of the female journalist www.albavolunteer.org

‘‘Women-journalists are unreliable as a class . . . the influences of domesticity are too strong to be lightly thrown off," he lamented.

They suffered, he argued. from ‘‘slipshod style . . . an undue insistence, a shrillness . . . a garrulous, gesticulating, inefficacy’’; they were ‘‘inaccurate and careless’’; they overused metaphors and similes ‘‘with glee’’; were too prone to writing ‘‘fanciful essays’’; ‘‘too fond of corresponding with editors’’; and so forgetful that they were liable not to include their own names in their correspondence. But take heart, aspiring female journalists: Bennett concluded that you were not entirely without hope.

With the sound advice of his guide, they could hope to make a decent career writing about ‘‘nature notes; household affairs; country occupations; parochial management; home handiwork; village sketches’’ - and even ‘‘fashion, cookery and domestic economy, furniture, the toilet, and (less exclusively) weddings’’.

Over a century later, the outlook for women hoping to pursue a career in the media is a little less bleak.

We are, fortunately, no longer confined to writing about parochial management and penning amusing village sketches - there are female national newspaper editors, business journalists, political correspondents, current affairs presenters, radio producers, economics correspondents, and so on.

But Bennett can rest easy in the knowledge that there are still fewer females involved in producing what one of my colleagues calls ‘‘the serious bit of the paper’’.

Across the industry as a whole, there are more male columnists, editors, business journalists, political journalists and crime reporters than there are female.

Because of the nature of their work, they are typically given a higher profile by their employer, promoted more enthusiastically in the front page blurbs, and therefore more likely to appear on the discussion panels of current affairs shows on radio and television.

And so the cycle continues.

Inevitably, much of this is down to choice on the part of the journalists themselves - I’m one who never laboured under the desire to be a political correspondent or a business reporter.

But it’s not enough to dismiss it as simply a question of choice when, sometimes, the choices made by women are not much of a choice at all.

I was forced to think about this recently when I was invited to take part in a conference organised by the National Women’s Council.

The conference examined the question of how women are represented by and in the media.

Beforehand, I dug out some recent statistics compiled by the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF),which showed that two-thirds of senior management jobs in the global media are held by men - though women hold 41 per cent of writing and editing jobs. So why weren’t they getting the top positions?

I didn’t have to look far for a case study. In a piece of apposite timing, the day before the conference, I had resigned my job as editor of the online news site, TheJournal.ie.

When I had been offered the job a year before, it seemed ideal: the opportunity to get involved in an exciting media start-up, and to put my stamp on a new and innovative online news site.

There were some considerations - well, there were two chief considerations, then aged three and two. But my employer was understanding and flexible, and my husband was heroically hands-on, so I figured we’d work it out.

In practice, ‘‘working it out’’ meant getting up at 5.30am five days a week in order to be at my desk at 6.30am, where I would work for five hours straight, before getting back in the car and hurtling across town to pick my two children up from Montessori.

At home in the afternoons, I became a master at the art of sending surreptitious e-mails while playing in the sand table, or pushing a swing. As soon as my husband got home to take over at 6pm or 7pm, I was back on the laptop or the iPad for a couple of hours, before collapsing exhausted into bed. I worked almost every Sunday, and juggled a number of other work commitments.

Photo by Jennifer O'Connell

But while the site went from strength to strength, I struggled.

My two-year-old was on his first year in Montessori and was regularly sick.

I saw less and less of my friends. I was constantly guilty and always tired. I invented a new game called 'The Cinema', which involved closing the shutters and putting on a DVD while we all collapsed on the sofa.

Meanwhile, a third of my part-time salary went on tax, a third was the exact equivalent of the mortgage and the remaining third went to pay my brilliant childminder - who was so fabulous I hardly ever begrudged the fact that she was earning as much into her hand at the end of the day as I was.

Earlier this year, my by-now four-year-old stood up during The News at school and announced that She had a ‘‘very lazy Mummy - she always needs to sleep’’, before agonisingly twisting the knife with the qualification that ‘‘luckily, my Daddy’s not lazy at all’’.

On the upside, I became a master in the art of multi-tasking.

On the Sunday night the government held a press conference to announce that Ireland would be seeking a bailout from the IMF, I sat in front of my TV tweeting it live, not even missing a beat when the two-year-old, who had pneumonia, ran into the room and vomited all over the floor.

Something had to give.

And so, a month or so ago, I made the difficult decision that I had reached my own, entirely self-imposed glass ceiling, and resigned my job.

Perhaps if I'd had a less demanding role, or grandparents living around the corner, or a network of nannies, au pairs and friends close by, I'd have managed. Maybe if the job had come along five years earlier or five years later, it might have worked. Certainly, if either my husband or I had been able to be home for one or two full days a week, or to work from home more often, it would have been easier.

As it was, he uncomplainingly took on responsibility for breakfast and one school run every day, was home to oversee bedtime every weeknight, and did more than his equal share at weekends and when they were ill. But it was never quite enough.

Because in the end, the responsibility that came with being editor of a 24/7 news site was simply incompatible with the other responsibilities I’m lucky enough to have in life. I was no longer merely juggling; I was struggling.

I don’t plan on disappearing into a cloud of self-raising flour and a flurry of play dates - not that that’s an entirely unattractive prospect - and I don’t foresee a future writing colourful village sketches or exploring the world of home handiwork.

I will still be involved with the site, just not in the day-to-day running of it, and I’ll concentrate on developing my other professional commitments - including my column for The Sunday Business Post, my blog, and my radio and TV work.

I was brought up in a generation which believed not just that we could have it all, but that we were obliged to have it all. But it took having it all for me to realise that it was a lot less fun than it sounds.

This is an edited version of a piece which first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on May 22, 2011

The moment Twitter came of age in a mountainy village in Pakistan

2011-05-08T19:22:00.001+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

In the unlikely event that you were following Pakistani IT consultant Sohaib Athar on Twitter before last weekend, you’d have known that he liked snow, tobacco and had fled the chaos and power shortages of Lahore for the “serene and safe smalltown life” of mountainy Abbottabad.

You’d have known that he had a wry sense of humour and a distrust of much of what’s reported in the mainstream media. You’d have known that his son was badly hurt in a car accident and had to undergo surgery; and that he had a lot of anger about the political system in Pakistan.

You’d have know that he missed good coffee so much he set up his own coffee shop - with free wifi, naturally- in his adopted home. And you’d have known that nothing ever happened in Abbottabad.

Nothing, that is, until last weekend.

Athar was still awake at 1am on Sunday when a loud helicopter started hovering overhead, sounding like it was circling.

“Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter,” he tweeted.

Then there was what he described as a “huge window shaking bang”. Athar tweeted that he hoped it wasn’t the start of something nasty.

For the next few hours, he was as much in the dark as anybody – he shared on his Twitter page rumours that one of the helicopters was not Pakistani; that it had been shot down, or that it had been involved in a training accident.

Ironically, it was through Twitter that Athar – like so many of the rest of us – discovered that what he’d heard was, in fact, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

When the news was officially confirmed some eight hours later, he tweeted a wry “Uh oh, there goes the neighborhood … [and] now I'm the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”

After Athar’s Twitter page, his blog, his various email accounts and his Skype had exploded with interview and friend requests, he eventually issued a last, pleading tweet: “Bin Laden is dead. I didn’t kill him. Please let me sleep now.”

If you still need to be convinced about the point of Twitter, or its role as a news medium – then, let’s face it, the events of last weekend are unlikely to have done it for you.

But consider the results of this poll from Mashable, the social media news site which generates 40 million page views every month. It asked its readers where they first heard about Bin Laden’s death. Over 14,000 people responded: fourteen per cent of them heard about it on television. But 19 per cent heard about it on Facebook – and a shocking 36 per cent heard about it on Twitter.

A full hour and ten minutes before the President of the United States made his speech on US television (at 11.35pm ET, over an hour later than scheduled) last Sunday night, Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff, Keith Urbahn, tweeted: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn.”

Urbahn quickly added, “Don’t know if it’s true, but let’s pray it is.”

By 11pm, Obama still had not taken to the podium to address the US nation, but the news was already all over the web. The New York Times reported that at that time, there were more than a dozen Facebook posts with the word “bin Laden” every single second. The New York Post’s Web site blared, “We Got Him!” The Huffington Post front page read simply: “Dead.”

My former Sunday Business Post colleague turned Guardian correspondent in Pakistan/Afghanistan, Declan Walsh, tweeted prosaically: “F***. I’d better put my shoes on.”

As Obama’s speech finally aired on television, more than 4,000 messages were posted on Twitter per second.

Many people will remember where they were when the news of Osama bin Laden’s death broke, simply because it was news they’d been waiting nine years to hear; because for them it represented, as Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera put it, “a major victory ..by the good guys against the baddest of the bad guys”; because it was a Kennedy moment, or perhaps they’ll remember it because the world suddenly started to feel a whole lot less safe.

But I think I’ll remember it as the day when social and online media finally went mainstream; the day when traditional forms of media finally (if probably only briefly) stopped looking down their noses at their online counterparts. By the following afternoon, most international newspaper websites had their own versions of “how the news unfolded on Twitter” pieces – which is as close as many of them will ever get to doffing their caps in respect.

On a personal level, I have many reasons to like Twitter. It’s through Twitter that I get most of my news, that I’ve got back in touch with old friends and former colleagues, that I’ve researched stories and landed minor job offers and major career opportunities.

When I was freelancing from home full-time, it was acted like a virtual office watercooler, a chance to share gossip and kick around issues of greater global importance than whether Lightning McQueen really is faster than Dash from the Incredibles.

But on a professional level, it’s an absolutely essential tool – I can no more imagine being a journalist in world without Twitter now than I can imagine going back to filing all my copy in DOS, or tripping across the Liffey to the Ilac Library every time I wanted to check a fact.

Of course, Twitter postings still come with a major health warning. The more it goes mainstream, the more it is the case that you can’t believe everything you read online.

Take this tweet from @SkyNews, posted at midday on Monday: “Reaction: World Leaders Hail Obama's Death”.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on May 8, 2011.

What do Mr X, ETK and NEJ have that Jeremy Clarkson doesn't? Privacy and intrigue

2011-05-01T20:48:00.001+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

You could probably summarise everything I know about football on the back of a tooth whitening strip.

It would read something like this: Mr X is a premiership footballer who enjoys a “wholesome family man” image but who has been having it off behind his wife’s back for six months with the pretty Welsh girl who used to be in Big Brother.

Ironically, I couldn’t give a fig whether happily married premiership footballer, Giuseppe Smith, had an affair with a reality TV star turned topless model. It’s only the court-ordered anonymity that makes the story interesting.

wikimediacommons.org

This is a phenomenon known as the Streisand effect, after Barbra Streisand’s ill-fated attempt to suppress the publication of photos of her home, which only served to generate a media frenzy.

And so, according to the Streisand Effect, the news that the ‘household name’ TV actor, known as ETK, had a six month affair with a married co-worker before they broke up and she was asked to leave the organisation for which they both worked; or the story that a world famous married actor identified as NEJ has been calling on the prostitute formerly linked to Wayne Rooney, are far more titillating than, say, the recent, faintly stomach-churning revelations about Jeremy Clarkson’s alleged affair with a leggy Top Gear colleague.

We only know about Mr X, NEJ and ETK, because they were so desperate to kill the stories about their infidelity they went to court to seek a super injunction, a relatively new phenomenon in UK law.

Celebrities who want to stop a story about them getting into the papers have always had recourse to the injunction. But if they go for a so-called ‘super injunction’, then no reporting at all is allowed – including reporting of the super injunction’s existence.

Super injunctions have become so popular in Britain in the last 12 months that whole newspapers now read like the Psst! columns beloved of celebrity magazines. Which premiership footballer’s been scoring offside again? Which actor’s been snuggling up in his trailer with his female co-star?

It’s impossible to know how many stories have been kept out of the papers in the last year and a half by virtue of super-injunctions: the Guardian estimates the number to be at last 20; the Times puts it at closer to 30.

But super-injunctions are a high-risk game for celebrities because when they backfire, they are liable to do so spectacularly. In January last year, after footballer John Terry’s super-injunction against the media reporting allegations of an affair with team-mate Wayne Bridge’s girlfriend, Vanessa Perroncel, was lifted, the tabloids went wild in revenge.

But while it was impossible to avoid the Terry saga, you’d have to have been paying close attention to have spotted the one paragraph apology to Vanessa Perroncel that two of these tabloids quietly printed ten months later.

In the almost identically-worded retractions, the papers admitted that, not only did the stories they published about Perroncel’s “affair” with Terry represent an invasion of her privacy, they weren’t actually true.

Perroncel, who always denied the affair, later said in an interview with Grazia magazine: “I think he should have let the newspapers publish and we could have just sued them. Instead the story became the injunction."

Shame no one asked her opinion.

And, of course, this is where the real difficulty with the concept of the super injunction lies.

There’s something faintly sinister about the prospect of (invariably) wealthy, (almost certainly) male stars trooping off to the courts to get injunctions handed down by (invariably) wealthy (almost exclusively) male judges.

But there’s nothing faintly sinister about the way these super-injunctions contrive to treat the women involved like, as the Guardian’s lawyer Gill Phillips put it last year “chattels…bits of property”, whose rights are not only secondary to those of the men involved, they are discounted altogether. It’s just sinister.

While I’ve no real interest in knowing what the married actor got up to with the prostitute who also boasted Wayne Rooney as a client, I do have a difficulty with the legal system on which our own is so closely modelled effectively sanctioning the right of men to treat women as lumps of meat.

On the surface, super injunctions merely guarantee celebrities the privacy to pursue their lives without press invasion. By issuing them so indiscriminately, judges are giving men like them the nod to do what men like them have always done – with little or no regard to the effect on the women (or the children) involved.

In the case of Mr X, the judge prohibited newspapers from naming him – but chose not to extend it to Imogen Thomas, the former Big Brother contestant with whom he had the affair.

And there’s another issue. All too often, when the courts claim to be concerned with a public figure’s privacy, in fact what they’re doing is offering an insurance policy against self-inflicted damage to his commercial reputation.

Of course, super injunctions aren’t the exclusive preserve of wealthy individuals.

They’ve been used very effectively by big corporations to gag newspapers – as in the case of the Trafigura oil company, which successfully got a super injunction preventing the Guardian reporting on its role in the dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast.

In recent days, the British Prime Minister David Cameron weighed in to the debate, saying he felt “a little uneasy” at the way privacy laws were being developed in the courts, without the British parliament having its say.

He pointed out that MPs, rather than judges, should be the ones to decide the right balance between freedom of the press and an individual’s right to privacy.

He’s right, of course. Because the alternative is a two-tier system, in which you’re entitled to as much privacy as you can afford. If you’re a wealthy premiership footballer or a famous actor, in other words, you can have as much privacy as you like. If you’re a grieving parent, or the innocent child of a convicted killer and a dead mother, as much privacy as you can afford may very well mean none at all.

The irony is that super injunctions are like a red rag to a bull. Thanks to Google, it took me about 30 seconds to find out the identities of NEJ, ETK and Mr X - at least if the online consensus is to be believed.

Unfortunately, as I’ve no desire to be extradited to Britain and thrown into jail, I can’t tell you. But even if I could, you probably wouldn’t have heard of two of them either.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on May 1, 2011.

The sour truth about sugar

2011-04-24T20:56:00.001+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

My American friend, Kate, underwent a painful break-up last summer. It was worse than any split with a boyfriend, she insists. In fact, she can’t imagine that her marriage falling apart could possibly have been any more traumatic.

Kate ‘broke up’ with the mother of her son’s best friend.

“I thought we had so much in common. They boys got on a like a house on fire. We had the same approach to parenting – I thought. Then we went on holidays together,” she explained, staring dolefully into her skinny decaff soy latte.

“We had lunch on the first day, and I just knew.”

What happened? I gasped. “She ordered the boys a Coke.”

When I’d finished laughing (it took a while), Kate – who’s always ahead of the curve in these matters – ordered me to go home and watch a YouTube video of a lecture by a paediatric specialist in endocrinology to students at the University of California entitled, Sugar: The Bitter Truth.

I did go home and watch the video – all 90 minutes of it.

In the lecture, the paediatrician, Robert Lustig, explains how the world is seeing an epidemic of obese six month olds; how the average American is consuming between 185 and 300 calories more per day than they use up; how drinking one can of soft drinks per day adds up to over a stone in weight in the course of a year; how, as far as your liver is concerned, sugar is just as toxic as ethanol.

His central point is that the focus on fat and simply overeating as the main cause of the obesity epidemic is wrong-headed and misleading.

Instead, he says, sugar is to blame – and not just for obesity, but also for the increase in heart disease, hypertension and some of the most common kinds of cancer. “The fat’s going down, the sugar’s going up. And we’re all getting sick,” he says.

He also believes that not all sugars are created equal. Refined sugar – sucrose - and the fructose found in juices are just as “dangerous”, just as “poisonous”, as the much maligned high-fructose corn syrup found in soft drinks and almost every processed food - and much more dangerous than the glucose found in carbohydrates.

Whole fruit contains fructose, but since it also has fibre, which Lustig says acts as an “antidote”, it’s okay. Fruit juice is not.

I was shocked. And then my 3-year-old asked for a glass of apple juice, and I promptly forgot about it.

But I remembered Kate’s break-up story last weekend when I came upon a lengthy article in the New York Times entitled ‘Is Sugar Toxic?’

The article sets out to stand up or debunk the claims made by Lustig. It points out that, although he’s a specialist in endocrinology, he hasn’t actually carried out any of the studies he cites himself.

It points out that he uses the world ‘evil’ five times in his lecture; and the word ‘poison’ 13 times. It admits that part of the appeal of his message is that he’s a compelling public speaker, and that he has a habit of taking suggestive evidence and presenting it as incontrovertible.

But it also finds that almost everything he says in that 90 minute lecture is scientifically valid.

Lustig’s theory is that the obesity epidemic is not simply down to us consuming more calories than we expend – the ‘empty calories’ theory. Instead, it’s how our body handles sugar in refined or liquid form – sucrose or fructose – that makes these types of it so dangerous.

Glucose – which is consumed in carbohydrates like pasta, rice and bread – delivers a hit to every cell in the body, where it is broken down and converted to energy. If you consume 120 calories of glucose, for instance, only 24 will end up in your liver.

But fructose can only be metabolised by the liver. If it hits the liver at sufficient speed, in sufficient quantity, the liver starts converting it to fat, a process which causes you to get fat, and – because some of the fat never makes it out of the liver – also eventually leads to insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance can cause diabetes, hypertension, heart disease – and may even be a hidden factor in many common cancers.

If it’s true, Lustig’s theory turns just about everything we thought we know about nutrition on its head.

We knew sugar was bad for your teeth, and that if you consumed too much of it and didn’t exercise enough, it could make you fat.

It’s true sugar is bad for your teeth but it’s also harmful to your liver, your heart and may be a carcinogen. And you should be far more worried about your liver than your teeth – because as far as your liver is concerned, fructose is just as toxic as ethanol, it’s “alcohol without the buzz”.

Not all sugars are created equal, either – sugar from carbohydrates (glucose) is easily metabolised and unlikely to end up as fat in healthy adults. But 30 per cent of sugar from fructose ends up being converted to fat. As Lustig says: “A high sugar diet IS a high fat diet.”

You might remember that the next time you consider ordering a Coke for your child – or someone else’s.

But you should think about it, too, the next time you smugly spear a juice carton with a straw for your child; let them have a fructose-packed ‘healthy’ yoghurt drink; douse their vegetables in sugar-packed ketchup to encourage them to eat; offer sweetened yoghurts as a healthy option, or give them a flavoured milk drink, because they won’t drink milk.

Lustig ends his lecture by explaining the four changes he insists the obese children attending his clinic make.

They drink nothing except milk or water. They eat their carbohydrates with fibre – (because “when God made the poison, he packaged it with the antidote”.) They always wait twenty minutes before they go back for seconds. And every minute they spend in front of a screen must be ‘bought’ with a minute spent exercising.

To Kate, I want to apologise for calling you nuts. Neurotic, maybe. But not so nuts after all.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on April 24, 2011

Image courtesy of wikimediacommons.org

Six reasons to be cheerful we're depressed

2010-10-03T15:17:00.001+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

As of last week, we are officially in a double dip recession. If you didn’t notice the bit in between the two dips, don’t worry; nobody else except Brian Lenihan and Brian Cowen did either.

But, cheer up. It’s not all bad news. There are plenty of advantages to being able to stop pretending that the economic meltdown was a mere blip in our stellar financial trajectory. I know that I cannot, for instance, be alone in failing to mourn the demise of the raised outdoor hot-tub.

So now that we are officially in the grip of a proper, grown-up, stop-washing-and-eating-and-sleeping depression, there are a few other accoutrements of success from which I propose we collectively divest ourselves.

Photo by saaleha on Flickr

I’m not talking subordinated Anglo bonds, though I’ll personally be happy to drive to the recycling centre the day we decide to dump those.

We may not be able to achieve the kind of unity of purpose needed to form a national government or agree on a new President, but I bet we’d all back a manifesto that included the immediate abolition of the following:

1. Cupcakes

Don’t get me wrong. I approve of cake in almost all its forms – muffin, carrot, brownie, Blackforest.

Fairy cakes – as in small, dried out lumps of a sponge with a carelessly applied daub of white icing sugar and a Smartie stuck on top – I have a particular fondness for.

But it’s the fairy cake-meets-art-installation universally known as the cupcake I can’t abide.

It is not just the disproportionate human effort that goes into them – all that piping and dusting and decorating and accessorising with edible, glittery ballet-dancing pandas – or the dubious cultural heritage or the extortionate cost, or even the ridiculous size (I recently spent €5.25 on a cupcake the size of a Big Mac for one of my children, on which she promptly gagged and spat into a bin). And that’s the nub of the problem. Chiefly, what I have against cupcakes is that they never taste very good. Like so much of what gripped this country over the past eight years, they represent the ultimate triumph of marketing, greed and pretension over desire. 

2. Wood, zinc or titanium cladding on houses; houses with glass box extensions or garden rooms; houses what my granny would have called ‘notions’

The Celtic Tiger had never seemed a more distant memory than when I read last week about the €4 million court case being taken by director Jim Sheridan and his wife, Fran, against eight separate defendants over alleged defective works on their seafront home in Dalkey.

The Sheridans’ home, Martha’s Vineyard, is unquestionably a beautiful property. It was built on the footprint of a fisherman’s cottage they bought in 1997, and was intended to be one of “the finest coastal properties in Ireland”. It scooped an RIAI award in 2006, and went on the market for €8 million the following year, when the Irish Times visited it and wrote in reverential tones how: “the sea seems close enough to touch, though the floor-to-ceiling windows are in triple strength glass to withstand the weather.”

Unfortunately, even triple strength glass could not hold the tide back, and the Sheridans claim their house now leaks in more than 17 places. There’s a parable in there somewhere, I’m sure. 

3. Queuing for your child's place in national school

One morning last week, my husband got out of bed at 6am, and went to stand in the rain outside the secretary’s office at the national school in the next parish for three hours.

Later that day I got a message that another primary school in an affluent suburb nearby – one of many I phoned in late 2007 to be told by the perfectly pleasant secretary that I was much too late to put my child’s name down for September 2011 – suddenly had spaces left in the Junior Infants class for 2010.

It’s an alarming indication of the speed at which emigration is becoming a solution to the financial woes of many families, that there are no longer enough four-to-five year olds to fill up the junior infants class in one of the most prosperous suburbs in the capital.

But on the upside, think of all those extra hours in bed for the parents who stay behind.

4. VBL. Visible Boxers Line

Young men of Ireland, we don’t care how much your boxer shorts cost you, or how pert your bum cheeks are. We really, really don’t want to see them peeking out above the waistline of your trousers, which you have for some reason opted to wear suspended halfway between the backs of your knees and your buttocks. We all know that the country hasn’t got an arse in its trousers, but there’s really no need to go around pretending to be the living embodiment of this phenomenon.

5. Smart TVs

I recently encountered the concept of a TV with a built in motion sensor. If you don’t wave at it every so often, it shuts itself down in protest. I thought the whole purpose of a television was to give you an excuse to slump comatose on your sofa (unless, of course, you’re watching Brendan O’Connor on Saturday Night Live, in which case the point is to sit on your sofa and shout insults). Can we please just stop this madness? TVs mounted on the wall over the fireplace; TVs with high definition and cinematic surround sound… they’re all wrong. A TV was designed to be a small, unobtrusive box in the corner, not a demanding, shouty toddler, who wants to be listened to and admired and waved at all the time.

6. All of the following phrases....

Rent is dead money. You don’t even need money to buy property these days. This is a good time to invest. It’s always a good time to buy. Ireland is different. We’re punching above our weight. We are where we are. This is a new paradigm. The fundamentals of the economy are sound. There will be a soft landing. Our Irishness gives us a distinct selling point. We are where we are. We’re in a period of adjustment. This is not about apportioning blame. We all lost the run of ourselves. My conscience is a million per cent clear. The economy has turned the corner. We need to stop talking the economy down. It’s all the media/Lehmans/cheap-shot commentators/Twitter’s fault. At least we’re not Iceland. At least we’re not Spain. At least we’re not Greece. While we are where we are, at least we’re not where we were…. etc.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on October 3, 2010.

International markets have no confidence in our leaders - isn't it time we did something?

2010-09-12T13:19:00.001+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell

Brian Lenihan gave me one of my few laughs last week. Speaking to the Guardian newspaper, he insisted that there were no easy fixes for "the size of the bust in Ireland".

Disappointingly, though, he wasn’t talking about new government initiatives to support Ireland’s more generously-endowed female populace. Rather, ‘the bust’ – it turns out – is the latest and the snappiest in a long line of euphemisms to describe the, erm, situation variously known as the ‘current economic climate’, ‘the emergency’, or ‘Lehman Brothers’.

"We will not be distracted by those who suggest that there is some kind of quick fix where you can bust the country and magically stage a resurrection," the Minister for Finance insisted.

Sadly, though, his own party seems convinced otherwise.

Fianna Fail clearly does believe there is a quick fix which can do exactly that – bust the country and then stage a resurrection (not to save the country, obviously – they all know the country’s bust beyond saving. But save the party.)

And the name of that quick fix, the UHU glu of Irish politics, is Brian Lenihan.

No sooner had Lenihan got off the phone from his subsequent interview with Sean O’Rourke - in which he revealed that his pancreatic cancer, while still in his system, represents no “clear and present danger” to his health, and coyly acknowledged that every politician would like to be leader of their party - than the inevitable excited chatter started.

“Lenihan leaves door open on future bid for the leadership ,” the Irish Independent claimed in a piece quoting approving backbenchers. Elsewhere in the newspaper, Fionnan Sheahan speculated that “the prospects of Brian Lenihan running for the Fianna Fail leadership increased considerably yesterday.”

The Herald picked up the theme, noting approvingly how “in a rare display of PR adroitness, Lenihan has even managed to turn pancreatic cancer into a political advantage…. His party needs him -- and as far as many people are concerned, his country does too.”

Brian Lenihan has long been marketed as the Fianna Fail leader-in-waiting. If you like Bertie, you’ll love Brian L, the spin goes. He’s like a brighter, younger, more sophisticated version. With better hair.

There was a time when I might have bought into the notion of Brian Lenihan as the Fianna Fail party’s brightest young thing. He made a competent Minister for Justice. He behaved with dignity when his cancer was diagnosed last January, and has done an admirable job of not managing to allow a terrible, debilitating, and all-encompassing illness interfere with his job.

But any lingering trace of respect I might have had for Lenihan – and, by extension, his party, since he was the only thing left in it to respect - evaporated last week, as I watched the RTE Freefall programme, which documented the collapse of Anglo Irish Bank and the Irish economy.

The moment the UHU came unstuck was when Lenihan described how the ECB President, Jean Claude Trichet, hadn’t been able to reach him on September 27, 2008, because he was at the races in Gowran.

And then he sniggered, like a four-year-old who’d been caught with his grubby fingers in the Black Magic box.

This disconnect with reality – from someone who got us into this mess and is now charged with getting us out of it – would be utterly astounding in any context other than the Fianna Fail party.

From Fianna Fail, however, glib is as good as it gets.

Starting with Bertie Ahern’s admonishment to those who dared to question the ‘economic miracle’ that they should all “go and commit suicide”, to Brian Cowen’s ill-tempered refusal to engage on any level with his electorate, Lenihan’s party has shown a willingness to genuinely serve the needs of the country last seen in the barmy former leader of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov.

So why should we expect the progeny of one of Fianna Fail’s most established dynasties to behave any differently? Why should we expect him to miss out on the chance of a day at the races with his property developer pals, merely because our banks were on the verge of going bust? Why should we expect him to say anything more than the €25 billion to €30 billion or – what’s another ten - €40 billion costs associated with Anglo are “annoying and infuriating”?

Why should we expect him to be anything more than “a bit” concerned that large swathes of the population are genuinely and understandably terrified that Anglo may now be about to bankrupt us?

And how could the markets possibly have any confidence in the ability of Ireland’s dream team of Cowen and Lenihan getting us out of the mess they caused when they unconditionally guaranteed the banks, knowing Anglo was all but bust?

The answer, of course, is that they don’t.

Hours after Lenihan told his not-exactly hilarious anecdote about being out of range at the races while his country’s banking system teetered on the brink of collapse, the Wall Street Journal penned an article in which it uncompromisingly summarised the mess we were in.

Ireland had to go to the European Central Bank, it reported, to seek help stabilising “tottering Anglo Irish Bank, hoping to end a recurring banking nightmare that has sparked fresh fears about its national finances. Struggling with the euro zone’s biggest budget deficit relative to its gross domestic product at more than 14 per cent last year, Irish authorities are also grappling with the ballooning cost of bailing out the banks, especially state-owned Anglo Irish—a bill that has already hit €33 billion, or roughly 20% of Ireland’s GDP.”

The same morning, the paper also published an investigation showing how the European banking stress tests had understated the level of debt being shouldered by governments.

By the time the markets opened last Tuesday, bond investors were voting with their yields. By lunchtime, we were paying interest rates on ten-year debt more than 4 per cent higher than those being asked of Germany, at over 6.1 per cent. The haemhorrage only stopped when the ECB – which, only days before, had told us we were on our own - stepped in and bought up some surplus bonds itself, temporarily propping the price back up.

This week the markets told us in no uncertain terms that international investors have no confidence in our leadership – or in their ability to get us out of this mess.

Unlike Lenihan, we can’t turn our mobiles to silent and pretend this isn’t happening.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on September 12, 2010

Is generosity dead?

2010-08-29T19:06:00.000+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

I can see why Brian Cowen might be said to suffer from an image deficit. Or, say, Lindsay Lohen. Or Mel Gibson. Or Simon Cowell, Ivor Callely or Sean Fitzpatrick.

But the concept is a little bit more difficult to understand in the context of the 16.8 million Pakistanis, who have been severely affected by the flooding which has swept their country for almost four weeks.

They haven’t got food, shelter or access to fresh water. Their crops have been destroyed, so they are likely to go hungry for many seasons to come. Three and half million of their children are facing the threat of imminent death by disease or starvation. Cities have been left without a power supply as the flood waters demolished natural gas pipes. Schools and hospitals have been destroyed. Doctors in the region have reported the first signs of a cholera outbreak.

But what these people need most, the UN tell us, is a PR makeover.

This is the only explanation the organisation can come up with for what it calls the “quite extraordinary” reluctance by the rest of the world to offer aid, and for the shameful speed at which so much of the world’s media collectively slid the crisis off the front pages.

It’s hard not to agree with the UN’s conclusion that there is a kind of selective compassion at play here.

The flooding in Pakistan is a greater humanitarian disaster than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 northern Pakistan earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake combined, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Unfortunately for those involved, though, the television pictures aren’t as dramatic as an earthquake or a tsunami, and no white-faced holidaymakers have been swept to their deaths or separated from their loved ones.

But there’s more to our failure to respond to the Pakistani crisis than a dearth of dramatic TV footage or an inability to identify directly with the victims. After all, donors in the West have found it in themselves to rise to countless humanitarian disasters in Africa and Asia in the past.

The former Chilean diplomat Jorge Heine believes the classified documents released earlier this month by WikiLeaks may have been partly responsible for muting donor responses to the flood.

And it is possible to imagine potential donors wondering why they should send money to a country whose government is covertly backing Afghan insurgents and international terrorists.

But is it right to hold the entire populace accountable for the actions of a corrupt administration?

And , if so, where would that leave us in the eyes of Europe and the wider world if such a disaster were ever to befall Ireland? Would the rest of the world shake its head and tell us that since, based on its woeful track record, our government couldn’t be trusted to spend the money wisely, it was best they gave us nothing at all?

The Irish population has pledged €2.5 million, on top of a further €2m from the government. It’s not a lot, in the context of the somewhere-between-€24-and-€36-billion we’re likely to end up investing in a single zombie bank.

At home, discussions on Twitter and other internet forums revealed a suspicion over how a government wealthy enough to pursue a nuclear power programme could fail to have enough resources to supply its own flood relief.

But this, too, is a simplistic, reductionist viewpoint, especially since those living in the flood regions worst affected have suffered for many years from the government’s ineptitude – not mention an incredibly hypocritical one from a country as capable of squandering wealth as this.

As an editorial in the Daily Times of Pakistan put it last week:

“By the end of July when flooding started in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the civil administration had still not come out of its stupor. Our own political eminences continued playing politics with the floods and, despite being filthy rich, they did not contribute at all to alleviate the misery of the people.”

But while the writer accepted the notion that the country’s leadership suffered from a justifiable “trust deficit”, he pointed out that “the world community could [still] have funnelled their aid through international relief agencies. But it has not. The UN has appealed for $ 460 million for immediate relief. Not even one quarter has come in so far.”

It may be that there is something deeper at play here too, than our suspicions about the motivations of the Pakistan government.

Before the current crisis unfolded, Newsweek reporter Joshua Kurlantzick identified something he called ‘the death of generosity.’

Reporting on the last G8 summit in June, he wrote how, in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in January 2010, the international community pledged $ 5.3 billion - but only $ 505 million had been received at that point by the Haitian government. “The issue that had dominated the summit just five years ago, foreign aid, got little mention. Perhaps, it is not surprising, given how many rich nations are busy bailing themselves out of the debt crisis, but is emblematic of a wider malaise: the death of generosity itself.”

Kurlantzick speculated how, in an instant gratification society, donors like to get more bang for their buck than donating to long-term disaster relief efforts allows.

Oxfam agrees: “Donors typically set unrealistic time frames for reconstruction, and the level of infrastructural and political damage inflicted in Haiti suggests that they must think in terms of years, if not decades,” it observed recently.

Hillary Clinton may have been more right than she realised when she said: “This is a defining moment - not only for Pakistan, but for all of us. “

Do we believe that all people forced out of their homes because of confict or natural disaster are equally deserving of our empathy and help – or don’t we?

This column first appeared in the Sunday Business Post on August 29, 2010

Wedding Etiquette 101: Don't laugh at the bride

2010-08-22T19:10:00.002+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

On my wedding day, I walked down the aisle wearing a simply cut, floor length, ivory silk dress, a pair of sublime five inch strappy cream sandals, and a fat, swollen eye.

The dress was adapted from a design I’d seen Kate Hudson wear in a movie, the shoes were by Jimmy Choo and cost about the same as a small, secondhand car, and the black eye came courtesy of a particularly thirsty mosquito.

The eye didn’t spoil my wedding day – if anything it reminded me how lucky I was, as one of my best friends rushed off to her hotel room to get me a pair of shades; another tailed me all day with a pot of concealer, and a packet of Zirtek; and my husband gallantly pretended he didn’t notice.

Eight years on, I can laugh about it. Just. But it took me a very long time (like, years) to look properly at my wedding pictures. And, in hindsight, I could probably have done without the jokes about my being the fastest new wife in history to acquire a black eye.

That’s the thing about girls and our wedding days.

When you’ve spent months dividing your time between wrapping sugared almonds in tulle and masterminding the formula for a seating plan so complex that would leave a Fields medallist exhausted (if aunt x can’t sit beside cousin y who recently broke up with friend j, and uncle f has that body odour problem which means I can’t put him beside employer a etc?), your tolerance for other people’s hilarious quips or catty observations about your special day tends to be slightly diminished.

Which is why I felt so much sympathy for Sinead O’Connor’s outburst - which was published in another newspaper last weekend to a chorus of mean-spirited sniggering from various radio commentators.

O’Connor is angry about some of the less generous media coverage of her recent wedding, her third, to Australian musician Steve Cooney. I saw the pictures and thought she looked exactly like herself – beautiful, bursting with happiness, resolutely unconventional and gorgeously real.

So it was distressing to read her view that “every newspaper that covered my marriage bullied and abused me to the point where at a time when I should have been happy, instead I was extremely distraught, traumatised and heartbroken.”

O’Connor writes that she has contacted the Press Ombudsman about one of the articles, adding that “it is despicable and horrifying that my marriage was used as a chance to stamp on me.” She reveals how she found herself “sobbing in [her father’s] arms after reading a particular piece which sank to the level of heavily implying that I had lied about my experience of abuse growing up”, before rather magnificently concluding that the negative articles – most of them, she says, penned by female journalists – were written by people who “envy my freedom, my courage, my talent and my arse.”

Some observers suggested last week that O’Connor may have been overreacting to what were, in fact, rounded pieces of journalism. And perhaps she was – but if a woman isn’t allowed to overreact about her wedding, then no bride of my acquaintance seems to have got the memo.

There are perhaps three non-negotiable rules of etiquette which have crossed continents and survived centuries of social upheaval. You treat others as you would like to be treated. You don’t eat with your mouth open. And you never criticise a bride on her wedding day.

Take the furious reaction which erupted in the United States to the New York Times’s unflattering comments about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding dress.

The Times commissioned a stylist, Cathy Horyn, to deconstruct Clinton’s gown. Perhaps predictably, since she was being paid to infer as much, the stylist concluded that “her dress told a lot.”

Despite being designed by Vera Wang, “it was not an especially high-styled choice,” Horyn wrote, before comparing Clinton’s choice to that of Ivanka Trump, “which reflected a sophisticated taste”.

Even Clinton’s hair and accessories came under fire. The hair, Horyn added, somewhat grandiosely, “betrayed the Clinton women’s complicated hair history. Her minimal jewelry — a small bracelet, earrings — seemed closer to her personality.”

In the worst kind of backhanded compliment, she went on to suggest that Chelsea Clinton’s “pretty dress… reflects a woman whose focus is not directed in that way, and maybe is not that vain.” Of all the compliments a bride would be pleased to hear on her wedding day, it’s probably safe to say that “you’re obviously not very vain” ranks in the bottom 10,000.

O’Connor’s theory that women journalists are especially vicious when it comes to writing about other women carries more than a ring of truth.

In a bizarre piece published in the Daily Mail in June, journalist Liz Thomas deconstructed the changes O’Connor’s appearance has undergone in the 22 years since she recorded Nothing Compares 2U – and found that (Shock! Horror!) O’Connor appeared to have actually aged 22 years. “O’Connor is almost unrecognisable,” she wrote, “her androgynous allure replaced by an altogether dowdier look; The 43-year-old looked frumpy in grey top, long grey cardigan, baggy black trousers, grey trainers – and surprisingly - thick dark hair.”

I can’t think of many women – at least not outside of Hollywood - who would like to undergo a ‘before’ and ‘after’ 22 years and four children apart.

There’s an acute irony in the fact that this piece of invective was published in the Mirror, which is part of a tabloid industry that regularly ‘exposes’ celebrities perceived to have undergone plastic surgery, while simultaneously pretending to campaign for the use of ‘real size models’.

So here’s a recap for the bewildered. You’re damned if you decide to grow old gracefully. And you’re damned if you don’t. You’re damned if you’re too thin. And you’re damned if you’re too fat. You’re damned like Chelsea if you try too hard on your wedding day. And you’re damned if, like Sinead, you decide to be yourself.

There’s probably only one truly safe approach for women in the public eye who want to avoid this kind of vicious invective. Be a man.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on August 22, 2010

There's a single, practical reason Larry Murphy was released early

2010-08-15T11:47:00.006+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

Even with the passage of more than a decade, the facts of the case lose none of their power to shock. The cold carpark at Bagenal Court in Carlow town on a February evening. A young woman, locking up, bringing the takings to her car. Out of nowhere, the thump. The broken nose. The Fiat Punto, waiting quietly in a dark corner.

The terror of the nine mile journey. The stereo blaring. The first rape, on a dirt track between Beaconstown and Moone, in north Carlow, not far from where another young woman, JoJo Dullard, had previously vanished.

Kilranelagh in the Dublin mountains

The macabre pilgrimage though Carlow and Wicklow. The second stop, fourteen miles on, at Kilranelagh in the Dublin mountains. The third rape, and the fourth. The pain so awful she begged him to shoot her. Him revealing the names of his children. Her sudden, brave decision to cling on, to fight back with an empty aerosol can. The plastic bag on her head. His hands on her throat, his hands slamming the boot on her legs.

The car lights as two fox hunters, Ken Jones and Trevor Moody, drove up. The unbelievable relief she must have felt. The unbearable pain.

Last Wednesday marked exactly ten years and six months since the night that woman was abducted, brutally raped and almost suffocated by a then 35-year-old carpenter and father of two from Baltinglass in Co Wicklow called Larry Murphy.

She would very likely have joined the ranks of the disappeared-without-a-trace, had Jones and Moody not arrived as he was trying to kill her.

Last week, seeing his face splashed all over the newspapers - that distinctive dimpled chin, the neat haircut, the slight frown over the dead eyes - ahead of his scheduled release on Thursday, it must have felt that while his sentence was coming to an end, hers was only really beginning.

It’s often said that tough cases make bad law. And it’s hard to imagine a case tougher than this, or one which makes a more compelling case against automatic remission for sex offenders.

Larry Murphy qualified for remission not because he had made any great strides towards rehabilitation – according to his own estranged brother, Tom: “He didn’t receive any help, he wouldn’t take help.”

Nor did he qualify because the parole board believes he no longer represents a threat to society; in the same interview on Miriam O’Callaghan’s RTE television show last month, Tom revealed that his brother has offered no greater insight into his motivation than the kind of thing a teenager might say if you asked them why they failed their biology exam. “I went numerous times to speak to Larry after he going in, and the answer I got from Larry was ‘I flipped’.”

No, he qualified for remission because of a provision in our legal system which automatically reduces every sentence, other than life sentences, by a quarter.

I spoke to legal sources last week and no-one seemed entirely sure of the rationale for this practice, which was entered into the Irish statute books in 1937, beyond the fact that it also exists in Britain, and gives prisoners an incentive to behave.

Exactly what they’d have to do not to qualify for remission isn’t clear though: the killers of Garda Jerry McCabe actually took a prison officer captive, and they still had their sentences cut short by a quarter. Murphy has reportedly been a trouble-free prisoner.

At the time of the release of killers of Garda Jerry McCabe in 2009, one prison source was quoted as saying: "There are procedures in place to cancel some of this .. but it would be very difficult to enforce and would set a legal precedent."

This seems a fair point: before the courts last month was the case of Noel Callan, a man who has already served 25 years for the murder of a garda during an armed robbery in 1985. Callan was originally sentenced to death but this was later commuted by President Hillery to 40 years’ penal servitude with no possibility of remission.

Callan claims he is being discriminated against compared to others given life sentences, who are allowed out after spending various terms in jail.

But there is another, more pressing reason, for maintaining the status quo, and even – in some cases – increasing the extent of remission available from 25 per cent to 33 per cent of the sentence originally handed down. And that is that our prisons are already bursting at the seams. There simply is not the space to keep every prisoner in for the full term of their sentence. By May of this year, the number of inmates in Irish jails had reached a record 4,200 - over twice the total in 1990.

At first glance, Fine Gael’s policy of not allowing sex offenders to qualify for standard remission unless they are willing to undergo rehabilitation seems a sensible compromise, and would have kept Larry Murphy in jail for up to another four and a half years.

But that’s until you realise two things. The first is that one in every seven male prisoners in the country is in for a sex offence. The second is that there are only 20 places on rehabilitation programmes designed for sex offenders.

The prison service has said it would be willing to put up more, but there isn’t the demand.

In the meantime, a revolving door is a practical measure that seems to work for everyone.

Judges get to impose what they feel are appropriate sentences. The prison service gets to immediately reduce these to a more manageable 75 per cent or – in some cases – 66 per cent. And usually, by the time the prisoner comes round for release, the public interest has moved on so that no-one much – other than the victim – cares anymore.

That might have been the case last week, except for a few factors: the brutality of Murphy’s crime; the fact that his name has also been linked by gardaí to the disappearances of Annie McCarrick, JoJo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob; and the bravery of his brother in giving an interview to RTE.

Regardless of the public outcry, the early release of Larry Murphy was always going to go ahead.

The concept of automatic remission is just one anachronism of many, in a system that is not going to be fixed by the introduction of clearer sentencing guidelines or longer jail terms.

Until we sort out the overcrowding problem, everything else will have to wait. And with plans for Thornton Hall dragging on, that’s not going to happen any time soon.

This column was first published in The Sunday Business Post on August 15, 2010

The Death of the Telephone Call

2010-08-08T12:00:00.010+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell

So there I was, busy doing what I am most often to be found doing on deadline day - eating chocolate, listening to iTunes, obsessively checking my Twitterfeed and waiting for some pictures to upload on Facebook, whilst reading an obscure article on how technology is shaping children’s language development skills - when something unusual happened.

The phone started to ring.

Not my iPhone, but the actual landline. It’s so long since I’ve employed this dusty old piece of technology, I had a moment of panic as I wondered where it was.

When I eventually founded the handset – somewhat amazingly, still plugged in - under a pile of papers on top of my desk, I started at the number flashing on the low-tech LCD screen. It was 14 digits long, and began with the numbers “0037..” Not my mother, so.

Image via creativecommons.org

“Yes. Hello?” I snarled. There was a buzz, and a click, and eventually the voice a woman who sounded as though she was shouting into a tin can.

“Hello, Mrs O’Connell. This is the computer services department, ringing about your computer service…”

“Not interested, thanks,” I barked, and replaced with handset back in the cradle where it will patiently await the next missive from Mumbai - leaving me to get on with much more important tasks, such as watching YouTube videos of flying donkeys.

There is perhaps no greater measure of how dramatically the world has changed than the death of the old-fashioned telephone call.

When I was a child, our family phone was a gorgeous, creamy piece of curviness that sat on its own dedicated piece of furniture in the hall. A silver referee’s whistle hung on a hook nearby, in case of ‘dirty’ calls.

When it rang, its peals echoed through the house and all three older children rushed to get it. “Hello, 74693. Who’s speaking please?” we would recite obediently.

It was usually my granny, or my Dad, calling from work, or one of my mother’s friends. One memorable Christmas eve, it was a slightly-tipsy sounding Santa Claus.

Sometimes, when we asked who was on the phone – as we always, always did - my Mum replied it was just George Michael, calling to order more of her famous apple tart.

By the time I was a teenager, we had acquired two posh, push button devices in complementary shades of dirty brown – one for the kitchen, and one for upstairs, which was surgically attached to my ear for the best part of four years.

Image via creativecommons.org

I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my closest childhood friends, long after their faces have blurred.

Every important event for the first twenty or so years of my life was bookended by a phone call. Stories began on the phone, stories were recounted on the phone, and stories ended on the phone. When I got home from school or town, I would head straight for the kitchen, anxiously scanning every surface for the sight of the yellow Post-It that would reveal whether the world had ended while I was out, or more likely, that Warren had dumped me again. Both of which amounted to more or less the same thing.

There are funny phone memories too: the illicit reverse-changes call to my granny when I was an au pair in Germany at 16 to find out how to boil a potato; the prank calls my friend Elaine used to make on the coin phone when we shared a flat together in Dublin.

As a newly-minted journalist, I spent most of my days whispering urgently into a phone. By then, I’d acquired a mobile – my first an oversized, curvy, purple-and-orange Philips device, with a number that began ‘088’.

And it was, curiously enough, at about this time that my passionate affair with the telephone began to wane.

There have been memorable phone calls since – the time in 2002, when my then-boyfriend borrowed my mobile to ring my Dad and tell him he’d just asked me to marry him; the early morning in 2008, when I called my parents from a hospital bed to tell them their very tiny little grandson had just arrived unexpectedly early into the world – but most of the big news, along with all the idle gossip, the funny stories, the long moans about work or parenting, is imparted these days through other means: text, email, IM, Facebook, Twitter, Skype.

Somewhere along the way, I seem to have fallen out of love with the old-fashioned phone call. And research suggests I’m not alone.

Recent figures by Nielsen reveal that the average number of mobile phone calls we make is dropping every year, having peaked in 2007. And our calls are getting shorter. In 2005, they averaged three minutes in length; now they’re almost half that.

There’s a kind of irony in the fact that, in an era of always-on communication, there doesn’t seem to be any place for the old-fashioned phone.

A recent article in Wired magazine may explain why: “We don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It [itals]deserves[itals] to die.”

My four year old would probably agree. When her father was away on a business trip recently, I asked her if she’d like to call him. She promptly burst into tears. “I don’t want to talk to Daddy,” she sobbed. “I want to see him.” She meant via Skype.

Clive Thompson, the author of the Wired piece, points out the phone’s other shortcomings: “If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling… Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one.”

This is all true – but wasn’t it always the case? So why is it only recently that the phone has come to be seen as such a rude, intrusive device? Is it merely because all this technology has conspired to make us less sociable? Or is it just because, other than Mumbai-based telemarketing companies, no-one bothers to actually call anymore?

Thompson predicts that the phone will survive in an evolved form, so that in the future it will allow us to show prospective callers whether we’re busy, or free to talk. He believes that video-chatting will become more common, that we will ‘call less, but talk more.’

Either that, or the clerk for Western Union will finally be proven right in his 1876 memo predicting that: "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on Sunday August 8, 2010.

Some Children Are More Equal Than Others

2010-06-06T10:32:00.001+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell

Her name was Ruth.

She had another name, a name from Nigeria, but she preferred not to use it.

Too many painful memories, perhaps.

She was 15 years old when she was sent to Dublin by her grandmother, who hoped she might make a life for herself here, after the rest of her family had been murdered in an attack on their home by militants in Nigeria.

In the beginning, things went well for Ruth. She started in fifth year at a high-achieving girls’ school in south Dublin. She lived in HSE-provided accommodation nearby. Her English was quite good, and she seemed to be settling in well.

‘‘She was as bright and as cheerful as you could expect anyone to be, given what she’d been through," recalls one of her teachers.

Until the day, about three months after she started, that she didn’t turn up to school. Her teachers called the hostel and contacted her social workers, but no one had any idea what had happened to her. She had vanished into thin air.

Six months or so later, one of her teachers was watching the news. There was a report about local protests over the opening of a lap dancing club in the south of the country. He recognised one of the dancers. It was Ruth.

Some 502 migrant children have gone missing while in state care over the past ten years. But Ruth is an exception: she is one of only 58 who have turned up.

She never came back to school; her teachers still don’t know what happened to her after she was spotted in the lap dancing club. But they took some comfort from knowing that she was alive.

No-one knows what has happened to the other 444. Their photographs have never been festooned on lampposts; blurry CCTV footage showing them walking off into the distance has not appeared on the evening news; newspapers have never camped out on the doorsteps of the hostel where they lived, or offered rewards for information leading to their recovery.

The following children are some of the 141 registered ‘missing’ on a Garda operated database - ie. missing kids.com - which doesn’t state if they were in the care of the HSE or not.

Their names will probably mean nothing to you. But you can’t help thinking that, if they’d been snatched from the homes of their parents, that wouldn’t be the case.

There’s Simona Baric, a solemn faced Bosnian girl who went missing last summer from her accommodation in Monaghan, and whose height made her look much more than her 11 years.

Congolese Jennifer Anne Bena Princess, who went missing in Tralee in 2004 as a cherubic six-year-old, and is now thought to be in Britain. If she is still alive, Jennifer would have celebrated her 12th birthday this week.

Li Ki Yeh, a 16-year-old Chinese boy who disappeared last April from his accommodation in Dublin 2.

Kenyan Caroline Njoki, who was just 11 when she went missing from her accommodation on Dublin’s Lower Gardiner Street almost three years ago.

Jiao Ai, a slight, pretty Chinese girl of 16 with full lips and large eyes, who walked out of the hostel she was living in at 6pm one evening in March 2009 and never came back.

Six-foot tall Vasile Cichistu, a handsome, blue-eyed 16-year-old, who disappeared from his west Dublin accommodation six years ago.

Chen Hong Yu and Xiao Ming Chen, two 15-year-old Chinese girls, who were last seen hanging around Parnell Square one evening in January 2009.The list goes on, and on, and on.

In 2009 alone, 45 children went missing while in state care; only 36 of these have been traced.

Last October, more than a decade after the first separated children began arriving in Ireland, the HSE and the Garda Síochána finally signed a joint protocol which agreed the procedures which would be followed when a child went missing in the future.

The move came after repeated criticisms from those working in the area about a perceived lack of cooperation between the HSE and the gardaí; about poor record-keeping and poor inter-agency communication; and a haphazard approach to investigating the disappearances of so many of these children.

The HSE has taken some further steps to improve the care given to these children when they arrive in Ireland; from now on, they will not be dumped in a hostel managed at night by only security staff, and will instead be found a place with a foster family.

However, with 444 children already missing, these measures smack of applying for planning permission to fit a door to the stable, long after the horses have bolted.

Organisations such as Barnardos believe they still don’t go far enough to protect children like Ruth, who are vulnerable to a very particular fate.

‘‘Separated children are at specific risk of trafficking for sexual or labour exploitation," says Fergus Finlay, chief executive of Barnardos.

‘‘All gardaí and HSE personnel dealing with these children must be aware of the very real risks facing them in order to move swiftly and efficiently to find and protect these children if they go missing. We cannot allow these children to be exploited by individuals or gangs who exploit them in the worst ways for financial gain."

Denis Naughten, the Fine Gael TD, spoke about his concern last week that ‘‘traffickers may be using the care home system for vulnerable children as ‘holding pens’ for their victims until they are ready to pick them up’’.

It is hard to imagine any child more vulnerable than one who travels here alone, often from thousands of miles away, with little money, no family or friends to protect them, and often no idea where they’re going.

Yet the inertia which surrounds their care and the high number of them who disappear is staggering.

Once again, this weekend, the country is dealing with the fallout over the shocking numbers of children who have died under the watch of the HSE.

But what about the many more who have vanished while they were supposed to be in its care? Does the colour of their skin or the foreignness of their name mean they don’t count? Does it make their disappearance less alarming?

If the measure of a society is how it protects its most vulnerable members, then this society has had little reason to feel proud of late.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on June 6, 2010

Hundreds of children dead or missing in State care

2010-05-30T10:46:00.002+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell

The HSE once lost a file on my child.
There’s nothing unusual in this - almost everyone has a story of HSE incompetence.
The incident, though not serious, gave me a brief insight - a mere shadow of the kind of insight the whole country has been getting over the past seven days - into how irredeemably dysfunctional the system is.
My daughter, then a baby, had been referred by her public health nurse to a HSE doctor for a potentially serious concern, which could have had a lifelong effect on her mobility. From there, she was sent for an X-ray and - or so I understood - put on the waiting list for a consultant’s appointment.
That was the last we ever heard about it.
Perhaps nine months passed before I finally got around to making enquiries. The issue for which she’d been seen in the first place had cleared up by itself, but I wanted to know why it had never been followed up. I spent half a day on the phone, chasing up staff in my public health clinic and trying to speak to someone in the hospital, but it seemed the file had simply disappeared.
I was mildly annoyed, but now I realise I was lucky. In our case, they only lost a file.

The HSE, as we now know - as the families of Daniel McAnaspie, Tracey Fay, Danny Talbot, and countless others, have known for some time - routinely loses children.
Several hundred children - perhaps as many as 750 - have disappeared or died while in the ‘care’ of the state.
This newspaper revealed last week that the number of children who died under the watch of the state over the past decade may be as high as 200.
It now seems that even this figure, shocking though it is, could be conservative.
Despite the HSE’s ‘data collation flaws’ - as they choose to euphemistically describe the total dearth of information on the whereabouts of hundreds of children, some of whom are missing, and some of whom are dead - this newspaper reports this weekend that in two counties alone, the numbers of children who died while in HSE care could be as high as 20.
The Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) also revealed last week that, since March, the deaths of six children have been reported to it. That’s an average of two a month across the nation, 24 every year, or 240 since the turn of the century.
‘In state care’ doesn’t mean that these children were all in foster homes or state-run institutions; according to the definition under the Children Act, many of them may simply have been known to social workers.
But let’s not be hysterical here.
Let’s say the nationwide average is lower than it was in those two counties; let’s say that the months of March, April and May were a particularly brutal blip.
Let’s say that nine children in HSE care in every county have died over the past ten years. Let’s imagine that, even in Dublin, just nine children have died in that time while in state care. That still adds up to 257 children.
The latest estimate, meanwhile, on the number of non national children who have gone missing or died while in state care is between 400 and 500, according to Fergus Finlay of children’s charity Barnardos.
Leaving aside the fact that this is a not inconsiderable margin of error - these are, after all, children - just think about it for a moment. At least 400 children: vanished, evaporated, gone.

At the most conservative estimate, then, 650 children may have been lost - metaphorically or literally - while in the care of this state.
The real number is probably much higher.
Of course, the ‘data collation issue’ - or, as the HSE seems to prefer to call it, this ‘deficit’ or ‘inconsistency’ - means that it is likely to be some weeks more before we know whether this is an accurate picture.
In fact, the system is so utterly dysfunctional that, by last week, a single file on any of these children had yet to be handed over by the HSE to the independent team set up to review this issue.
Minister for Children Barry Andrews said last week he was ‘‘extremely frustrated’’ at the length of time it was taking the HSE to compile this information, and according to some reports, had even sought legal advice on what to do about it.
The HSE Assistant Director of Children and Family Services Phil Garland says he, too, is ‘‘frustrated’’.
It all raises the question of whether, among all these frustrated people being paid to run the HSE, anyone is actually in charge.
The title of the Minister for Health and Children, Mary Harney, might lead you to believe it’s her - as might the budget she manages of almost €16 billion. But if it is indeed Harney who’s in charge of all this, her contribution to the controversy when it first broke last week was notable only for its non-existence.
We’ve been here before, of course.
In 2003, Justice Mary Laffoy resigned from the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse, over claims that the Department of Education was refusing to hand over files relevant to her inquiry.
In the wake of the eventual publication of what would become the Ryan Report, all kinds of promises were made about children’s lives never again being so devalued.
Yet, here we are one year on, arguing over the definition of 'care'.
Were those empty promises? Or is it the case that when state bodies such as the HSE and minister such as Harney talk about protecting children, they’re only talking about children of a certain social background, colour or ethnic origin?
When they say children do they just mean ‘Irish children’? Or do they mean ‘children from functioning households’? Or do they mean ‘children who go to school’; ‘children with a mother and a father’; ‘children with someone other than us to fight their corner’?
Do they include the two children who have died, on average, every month, while they were what the HSE now likes to call ‘‘clients’’ of the state?
Perhaps Harney might come out and clarify this. If she won’t, then maybe it’s time Taoiseach Brian Cowen replaced her with someone who gives a damn about the children they have been appointed to protect.
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This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on May 30, 2010

Why Norris Would Be Good For The Áras

2010-05-23T14:26:00.015+01:00

By Jennifer O’Connell
As I watched Senator David Norris talk to Ryan Tubridy on the Late Late Show recently about his presidential hopes, I found myself experiencing a creeping discomfort.

Not because of his sexuality; I think Norris would make an inspiring, effective and unifying President for many reasons, just one of them his sexuality.

Rather, I was uncomfortable because of the way he felt it needed to be addressed.

Norris began by saying the fact that he is gay ‘‘should be irrelevant’’, and then went on to discuss it in away which signalled that he knew perfectly well it was anything but.

Tubridy asked his interviewee, not unfairly, whether he had a partner.

Norris replied: ‘‘I haven’t been wildly promiscuous. I’ve had about three serious relationships, and I love every single one of them, particularly Ezra, my Israeli. He’s a plumber."

But it was what he said next that made me cringe on his behalf. ‘‘I always say to him when the witching hour comes, ‘Now honey, off you go, guest quarters!’ We have a loving relationship, but it’s not intimate in that sense."

Do we really need this level of detail about the private lives of our prospective presidents? Have we become, as West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin put it recently, the family dog, eagerly hoovering up every single scrap from the floor?

Well, no. Of course we don’t need that level of detail. No one ever asked Mary Robinson or Mary McAleese how many sexual partners they’d had, or whether they still slept with their husbands. Technically, of course, no one asked Norris that either, but for some reason he felt the need to reveal it. I’m being coy. The ‘some reason’ is the simple fact that he happens to be a gay man.

Tubridy would probably have fallen off his chair if a straight male candidate for the presidency had started talking about how many sexual partners he’d had. He’d certainly have collapsed in a puddle if one of the Marys had felt the need to share such intimacies.

But when Norris divulged that he was ‘‘66, so don’t expect too much of a volcano in that area’’, the response from the audience was not surprise, but a tittering approval.

Norris is many things - a genuinely likeable person, a passionate advocate for human rights, an intellectual and an inspirational speaker, someone who is unapologetically posh and also a man of the people. In addition to all that, he is a savvy political operator. He understood instinctively that, however much he might wish it wasn’t still the case, his homosexuality would very likely be an issue for some people, so it was better just to get it out there.

He was almost certainly right, if the - for want of a better word - controversy exciting American political observers last week has been anything to go by.

It began in the most innocuous way possible, with a grainy,17-year-old photograph featuring Elena Kagan, US president Barack Obama’s nominee to take a seat in the highest court in the land, swinging a softball bat. The photo appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal 11 days ago.

That should probably have been that, except some conspiracy theorists began to wonder. What point was the WSJ trying to make, digging out a poor quality, 17-year-old, black and white photograph?

Softball’s a man’s game, right? Short haircuts aren’t terribly feminine, are they? Could Kagan be - whisper it - an actual lesbian? Michael Wolff, a blogger with the Newser website, wrote: ‘‘To say the obvious: it’s the hair. She sure looks gay."

Right-wing Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly added pompously: ‘‘Americans have a right to know if their Supreme Court justice has an orientation that may or may not dictate which way she votes on a vital issue."

And it wasn’t just the conservative commentators who jumped in to explore the hidden code behind the cut of her hair, the set of her shoulders, the swing of the bat. Gay bloggers rowed into the - and it feels hopelessly retrograde to even use this word in this context - debate, pointing out that softball was historically the sport of choice for lesbians.

I read it all and wondered whether this was some kind of giant spoof. Could this really be happening in a country which began decriminalising homosexuality in 1962,which now allows gay marriage in some states, and which elected its first black president almost two years ago?

Then, things took a turn for the truly bizarre. The White House came out to clear things up, revealing that Kagan is actually straight. Or not gay. Or at least interested in men. Saying otherwise, officials insisted, was a ‘‘smear’’.

In the unlikely event that anyone was still in the dark about which team the Supreme Court nominee was swinging for, presidential spokesman Ben LaBolt added that any claims that Kagan was gay were ‘‘false charges’’.

Eliot Spitzer - the former New York governor about whom lots of things have been said, none of them involving him not liking women - weighed in with the revelation that he ‘‘did not go out’’ with Kagan while the two were at Princeton, but he knew a guy who did. Or something.

It’s hard to believe these points need stating, but it appears they do. So here we go: first, who or what a potential Supreme Court justice likes to cuddle up with at night should have no bearing on their ability to uphold the law. And if it does, then they’re not the right person for the job.

Second, being called gay is not a ‘‘smear’’. Nor should it be a ‘‘charge’’, or any kind of reflection on your ability to do your job - whether that job is teacher, doctor, Supreme Court justice or president.

A few weeks ago, the idea of a President Norris was appealing on many levels. Now, reductive though this might be, it’s appealing on one level more than any other.

The prospect that we might be ready to consider electing a gay president, while the self-proclaimed ‘Land of the Free’ gets itself into a tizzy over the thought of a softball-loving Supreme Court justice, is - to borrow a phrase that Kagan would doubtless never use - just too fabulous.

Norris for the Áras? Yes please.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on May 23, 2010
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The Surrendered Mother

2010-05-16T12:34:00.001+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell
It’s hard to imagine now, but once upon a time, motherhood was a pretty straightforward enterprise. In the 1934 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘mother’ was defined as follows: ‘‘Woman who looks after children."

Nowadays, it’s a lot more complicated. ‘Parent’ is no longer just a noun; it’s a verb too. ‘Parenting’ is something to be practised, engaged in, endlessly discussed and agonised over.

To see how this has affected those at the frontline, you need to go to where they congregate in the greatest numbers.

Once upon a time, that might have meant the school gate, the playground or the shopping centre. But these days, the place where you go to learn about breastfeeding, disciplining a two-year-old, puréeing a carrot, filling out a primary school application form, and what mothers really feel about being a mother, is the internet.

Sites such as Rollercoaster, Magic mum and Eumom provide a place for mothers and - increasingly - fathers to meet and bond over the joys and travails of parenthood, without ever having to come face to face.

Here, under the comforting blanket of anonymity, the hyper-competitiveness that all too often characterises interactions in the playground or at breastfeeding groups, gives way to painful honesty, anxiety and a sometimes heartbreaking insecurity.

‘‘I think of these little people as perfect gifts entrusted to us to do right by and I am really fucking up," writes one guilt-ridden mother.

Another confesses that: ‘ ‘I feel I should be enjoying them more, but at times I can’t wait till they are in bed. I feel guilty about that too."

On and on it goes; the anxiety, and the fears, and the tortured analysis.

‘‘Just wondering is it failure on my part or is it normal for a four-year-old to develop an obsession with telling everyone to ‘shut up’ ? "; ‘‘I have serious concerns about my ability to parent my two boys properly and give them the kind of idyllic childhood all kids deserve’’; ‘‘I’m wiped out and think I need to wean my LO [little one] onto formula. I need to stop for myself. Am I horrible? Am I a terrible mother?"

How did we get here? How did we arrive at a place where motherhood became an enterprise so fraught with anxiety and potential hazard; where a child saying ‘shut up’ becomes his mother’s ‘‘failure’’; where an ‘‘idyllic’’ childhood is an automatic universal human right; where a depressed, exhausted mother who decides not to breastfeed is forced to wonder if she is ‘‘horrible’’ and ‘‘terrible’’?

This is the question US journalist Judith Warner asked herself not long after her daughter turned four, when - after 48 months of on-a-loop singing and reading and encouraging - she noticed that ‘‘I had turned into a human TV set, so filled with 24-hour children’s programming I had no thoughts left of my own’’.

And it wasn’t just her. ‘‘I was surrounded, it seemed, by women who had surrendered their better selves - and their sanity - to motherhood.

Women who pulled all-nighters hand-painting paper plates for a class party. Who obsessed over the most minute details of playground politics. Who - like myself - appeared to be sleepwalking through life in a state of quiet panic."

Is it any wonder, she thought, that 70 per cent of US mothers say motherhood is ‘‘stressful’’. The answer, she concluded, was that motherhood had become unbearably stressful.

Society had given women more choices, but none of the supports needed to utilise those choices in a way that allowed them to cling onto a thread of sanity. So it tells women they can have a family and go out to work, but doesn’t provide them with the kind of good quality, affordable childcare that makes this feasible. It promotes the culture of what she calls ‘total motherhood’, but shrugs its shoulders when women ask how the hell that can be achieved.

Much of what Warner said makes sense, but I suspect there’s more to it than that. After all, I have what is, according to her analysis, the ideal solution: I work part time from home, make enough money to pay for childcare for my two children, love my job and have plenty of free time to spend with them.

And yet, at intervals over the past four years, I have suffered from all the stresses she identifies: from the moment they were embryonic dots inside me, I have worried endlessly about my children’s development, the quality of the time we spend together, whether I am properly nurturing and feeding and disciplining and encouraging them.

French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter has turned her attentions to the same phenomenon and has come up with a more immediate - some would say brutal - solution. You wanted to be the perfect mother, she says, so you gave up work, shopping, sex and intellectual stimulation in order to breastfeed, make purées and wash nappies. And now you can’t understand why you’re exhausted, unhappy and singularly unfulfilled.

So here’s what you do: give the baby a bottle. Find a minder and go back to work. Find a babysitter, wash your hair, and go out with your partner.

Use disposable nappies and buy jars of baby food. Stop striving to be the perfect mother and accept that you may only ever be mediocre. In short, stop fretting and get a life.

To another generation of women, the only thing shocking about this advice would probably be the controversy it has attracted. Leave aside her comments about the ‘holy reactionary alliance’ between green politicians, breastfeeding militants, ‘back to nature’ feminists and child psychologists conspiring to force women back into the home, and it’s hard to find anything to disagree with.

Far from being a Simone de Beauvoir style activist advocating the shunning of motherhood, in fact, Badinter’s advice is not only humane, it’s sensible too. We bring our daughters up to be confident, me-first hedonists, and then expect them to renounce it all when they become parents in pursuit of ‘total motherhood’.

We hothouse our kids and fail to understand when they act truculent and unhappy.

Something’s got to give - and it shouldn’t always be the mother’s sanity or the family’s equilibrium.

Of course, there’s one thing Warner and Badinter have missed out on: being a parent is also fun, enriching and challenging in the best possible way. We just have to learn not to make it so hard on ourselves.

This article first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on May 16, 2010

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Battling The Black Dog

2010-05-09T11:33:00.009+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell

I’ve always had an affinity with the journalist and bestselling novelist Allison Pearson. This may be because of the night in February 2008 when I was sitting up in bed, reading her last novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, a semi-autobiographical account of the life of a working mother with two small children.

Perhaps it was her unflinching honesty, or maybe it was the passage where she discovers the raisins her son keeps leaving on the kitchen floor aren’t actually raisins, but - half way through page 108 - I found myself in labour. A few hours later, my tiny son arrived into the world, almost six weeks before his due date. I’ve never met Pearson, but since she precipitated my premature labour, I’ve always considered her a kind of friend.

Allison Pearson

I was shocked, then, to read her final Daily Mail column last week, in which she revealed she had been suffering from chronic, terrifying depression, the kind in which the nearby motorway bridge had taken on a strange, middle of the-night allure. She wrote how her therapist had asked when she had these thoughts.

"‘Usually at 4am.’How often are you awake at 4am? ‘Every morning.’ Every morning for how long? ‘I’m not sure.

Eighteen months.’ ?

‘‘I said I didn’t like taking tablets unless they were absolutely necessary.

‘Don’t worry. We just need to get you off rock bottom so you can start to get better.’

‘‘Rock bottom? Get better? What was she talking about??" ‘I’m not mad,’ I protested, ‘I’m a national newspaper columnist.’ And we both started to laugh."

Pearson went on to write about how she has become a ‘Sandwich Woman’; one of the growing numbers of women who postponed motherhood until her 30s and now finds herself trapped between the needs of her children and her ageing parents. ‘‘Permanently tired and distracted, I felt like I was being a lousy mother to my two wonderful children.

And I didn’t want to let it show, or God forbid, seek help," she wrote.

If Pearson tackled one of society’s lingering taboos in her 2002 novel - the myth that motherhood is an overwhelmingly enriching, fulfilling and totally satisfying experience, when in fact it’s just as often boring, frustrating and anxious - then last week, she set about dismantling another.

Although depression is as common as indigestion - one in four of us will suffer it in the course of a year - only a tiny fraction would ever admit to it.

Which is why the response tends to be so overwhelming when someone like Pearson opens up about it, or when Marian Keyes blogged in January about how she was ‘‘laid low with crippling depression’’.

‘‘I’m living in hell," she wrote. ‘‘I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t write, I can’t read, I can’t talk to people.

The worst thing is that I feel it will never end."

Marian Keyes

Keyes - as the outpouring of comments on her website revealed - is far from alone. In fact, people are ten times more likely to suffer from depression now than in 1945,with women and teenage girls twice as susceptible as men.

‘‘Is it women who are mad, or is it the society we live in?" asked Pearson. ‘‘We always suspected there would be a price for Having It All, and we were happy to pay it; but we didn’t know the cost would be our mental health."

But that’s not the whole story. Depression is far from a uniquely female phenomenon.

The truth, in fact, may simply be that, if women struggle to admit it, then men find it virtually impossible.

Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists points out that men are just as likely to suffer from depression, but much less likely to ask for help. They are also more inclined to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol.

One study showed men between the ages of 45 and 54 are seven times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than women, but half as likely to talk about them. While 85 per cent of us believe anyone could suffer from a mental health problem, two thirds would not tell anyone if we did.

Since his death from a suspected heart attack ten days ago, a different Gerry Ryan has emerged to the brash, bombastic, often outrageous and always hilarious presenter, whose voice was as familiar as the sound of the kettle boiling.

On the day after his death, Marian Finucane spoke on her Radio One programme about how she had seen him earlier that week and he had been ‘‘very, very stressed’’.

In this newspaper, his friend and colleague Gareth O’Callaghan - who has spoken about his own battle with depression - wrote ‘‘Gerry had many demons. It was clear on the occasions we talked that he was not always a happy man. . . [he]was deeply insecure, and he hated people to know that’’.

‘‘I wish you had shown that side of you which proved you were just as soft as putty," O’Callaghan wrote.

Whatever the truth about the pressures Ryan was under, the man for whom nothing was off-limits - a presenter who, in fact, was sanctioned early in his career for over-use of the word ‘penis’ during school holidays - chose not to talk about them; and perhaps that’s something we should all respect.

But it still doesn’t address the question: why is sadness such a taboo? Why is it still so hard to say you’re struggling, and even harder to hear someone you love admit it?

A couple of weeks ago, the Department of Health launched the See Change campaign, designed to de-stigmatise all kinds of mental illness. The event was attended by Miriam O’Callaghan and Eileen Dunne, but later that day, there was no mention of it on RTE news bulletins, and little coverage in the next day’s national papers. The blanket silence with which the initiative was greeted seemed to underline just how much it was actually needed.

The total dearth of media coverage prompted the Mental Health Minister John Moloney to raise the issue at an Oireachtas Committee hearing. ‘‘It struck me as if there was a conspiracy there," he said. ‘‘I am just left to wonder if we try this again who will we turn to?"

If depression and mental health problems continue to spread at the current rate, by 2020, it will be the second most disabling condition in the world - after heart disease.

It’s time to confront the black dog in the room. Because ignoring it is not going to make it go away.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on May 9, 2010
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Culpable Neglect

2010-05-02T18:47:00.011+01:00

By Jennifer O'Connell
Caroline McCann’s problems didn’t start with the credit union loan. They had taken root a long time before that.

She suffered from alcoholism and psychiatric issues, and she couldn’t read. She lost a daughter in tragic circumstances, and was forced to take out a loan to cover the cost of her funeral.

It wasn’t long before she began to miss payments. In 2003, her credit union obtained a judgment of €18,000 against her in court .But she kept missing the court-ordered repayment schedule of €82 a week. She didn’t grasp the seriousness of this, and never even sought legal advice until the gardaí turned up at her door. In 2005, the whole awful mess culminated with her being sentenced to jail.

Caroline McCann’s case is not unusual.

In the last five years, more than 1,000 people have spent time in prison for non-payment of debts. The average sentence is 27 days, though some loan defaulters spend as many as 90 days inside.

Most of these cases never make the headlines, unless they somehow manage to have the judgment overturned - as did the mother of four who was sentenced to a month in jail In May last year after failing to pay off €1,500 in debt mounting upon the credit card she had signed up for while in a psychiatric hospital. She was successful in having the sentence quashed.

But in 2008 alone, 276 people did go to jail for failing to pay a debt; by the end of October 2009, this number had dropped to 157.

We have Caroline McCann - in part at least - to thank for that. Last June, McCann succeeded in having the judgment against her overturned.

In her landmark ruling, Justice Mary Laffoy said it was ‘‘inexplicable’’ the state could continue to pursue people under an unconstitutional and ‘‘vague’’ scheme which effectively cost it money.

New legislation introduced in the aftermath of the ruling will make it more difficult for jail sentences to be imposed over failure to pay off a civil debt.

Under the new laws, the state must show that the debtor is guilty of ‘‘wilful refusal’’ or ‘‘culpable neglect’’, and has no goods which could be seized in place of the money owed.

Funny phrase, that: ‘‘culpable neglect’’. Which party, you can’t help wondering, is more guilty of culpable neglect? The credit union that gave a large loan to an illiterate woman who was suffering from psychiatric problems, or the woman who took the money and then failed to pay it back?

The credit card company that decided that an applicant in a psychiatric institution, whose total family income was €464 a week, was a good credit risk, or the woman who spent the money and then got into difficulty trying to pay it back?

Unfortunately, McCann’s victory doesn’t bring any relief for the thousands more jailed for non-payment of court-imposed fines.

In the first ten months of 2009, more than 3,000 people went to prison for failing to pay a fine, compared to 1,089 in 2006.This number includes the 50 or so people who are sent to jail annually for not buying their TV licence.

This issue came to the fore again last week, when the governor of the Dóchas women’s prison announced she was resigning after ten years in the job. Kathleen McMahon said overcrowding in the prison made it ‘‘completely impossible’’ for her to do her job in recent months.

She described how she has had to make space for up to 137women in an institution designed for 85, and said many of the women in her care were so low-risk they should never have been jailed in the first place.

It’s hard to conceive how the same state -which has been so assiduous in pursuing unpaid court fines that it has ended up with a prison service bursting at the seams - chooses to take such a softly-softly approach where other, much larger debts are concerned.

On the day McMahon announced her resignation, newspapers revealed that the government was ‘‘hoping its new relationship framework’’ with Irish Nationwide would ‘‘assist it in recouping’’ the €1million bonus paid to former Irish Nationwide managing director Michael Fingleton.

Fingleton, lest we forget, has cost the state considerably more than a few unpaid TV licences.

He is the former managing director of Irish Nationwide, a building society that has required a €2.7 billion cash injection by taxpayers in order to keep it afloat. Last week, the society reported losses of €2.5 billion.

The €1 million relates to a bonus Fingleton paid himself - along with his €27million pension package - when he retired in 2008, but later agreed to give back. (On the front page of last weekend’s Sunday Independent, he claimed it had been his intention all along to give the €1 million bonus away to charity.)

Then there is the €109 million owed to us by former directors of Anglo Irish Bank, including Seán FitzPatrick and David Drumm, which we apparently ‘‘don’t expect to be repaid’’. FitzPatrick is another one who has cost the state rather more than a few unpaid parking fines.

But he’s not languishing on a mattress on the floor of a shower room in Mountjoy jail with vermin for company.

No, having been arrested and questioned and released without charge, he is free to enjoy the spoils of his generous pension, his €400,000 golden handshake and his frequent trips to Marbella.

Former Anglo chief executive David Drumm went to Cape Cod with his pension entitlements intact and a €659,000 bonus paid by Anglo, and wouldn’t open the door when Charlie Bird came calling - which, it seems, was the best effort the state could make at going after him.

As double standards go, they’re dizzying. Our prisons are coming apart at the seams with people who - because of carelessness or stupidity or old-fashioned poverty - have cost us a few thousand euro in unpaid fines.

We’re prepared to fork out €2,000 a week to keep each one of them in prison. At the same time, a tiny number of well-connected men who have - through carelessness or stupidity or old-fashioned greed - cost the state hundreds of billions are living it up in Marbella and Dublin 4 and Cape Cod, untouched and - so far at least - untouchable.

‘‘Culpable neglect." It’s a funny old phrase, indeed.

This column first appeared in The Sunday Business Post on May 2, 2010
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