Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
In Ireland at some point in the 1970s there was such a queue of people waiting to take their driving tests that the government of the day said, what the hell, there’s only one way to get rid of the backlog, and gave everyone with a provisional licence a full driving licence. The result was,
Never let a good crisis go to waste, seems to be the approach of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service to the coronavirus pandemic. It has been promoting a couple of amendments to the Coronavirus Bill – two out of 14 – to allow women to take abortifacient pills at home rather than travel to a
Last night, when the Prime Minister made his address to the nation he declared that places of worship would be closed – thereby putting churches on the same basis as outdoor gyms. Today a statement from the Ministry for Communities clarified that churches should stay open, for private prayer. All good, Catholics like me thought. We
Well, thanks a whole lot, Gavin W. The announcement that schools would close in England from Friday was pretty well inevitable when Scotland and Wales announced that this was the way they were going, but it doesn’t make the decision less tricky for parents. It’s not apparent that the move was made for reasons of
There are those – most of my acquaintance in Ireland, frankly – who can think of nothing worse than Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald as leader of the next Irish government. She’s embracing the prospect; in a walkabout in Dublin’s fruit and veg market in Moore Street, she said, as you’d expect, ‘I may well
There’s been a shocked, wounded response on the part of pundits to the Church of England’s statement last week in response to the introduction of heterosexual civil partnerships. The Church observed that: ‘for Christians, marriage – that is, the lifelong union between a man and a woman, contracted with the making of vows – remains
Well, the witchfinders have come for Rebecca Long-Bailey. Website Red Roar has unearthed Long-Bailey’s responses to the question of abortion on the grounds of disability. She wrote: ‘It is currently legal to terminate a pregnancy up to full-term on the grounds of disability, while the upper limit is 24 weeks if there is no disability.I
Sorry, I don’t believe it. The Office of National Statistics has concluded that one in five adults was abused as a child. That’s right; a fifth of us, or 8.5 million people. The research used data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales; the Department for Education; the NSPCC and the National Association for
There’s one thing to be said for the possibility of the reconvening of the Stormont Northern Ireland Assembly: it makes a fool of those of us who take a cynical view of these institutions as mere talking shops, opportunities for gamma politicians to sound off to their own side. Wrong. The thing has been out
Let’s not get carried away. The Queen’s younger grandson may be decamping to North America with his lovely wife and baby but the Queen herself is very much in business; life goes on. It may certainly have been odd, not to say ill advised, for this headstrong couple to have announced their departure from Britain
There’s been a lot of criticism about Jeremy Corbyn’s want of humility and refusal to apologise for his errors in the wake of his party’s annihilation in its former safe spaces. But rather less for Jo Swinson about the dismal showing of the Lib Dems in this election. This was epitomised by her own defeat
Well, they’ve got their scalp. Prince Andrew is retiring from public life. But before he did, he said in his prepared statement all the things a more media-savvy individual might have done during the televised interview with Emily Maitlis. ‘I continue to unequivocally regret my ill-judged association with Jeffrey Epstein. His suicide has left many unanswered
Sometimes I have to admit the reason I read children’s books with pleasure is that I’m essentially puerile —and look, that’s not a bad thing if it means getting to read The Steves by Morag Hood (Pan Macmillan, £6.99), aimed at three year olds. It’s about two puffins called Steve who keenly resent the claims
So is it good news that Citizens’ Assemblies are to sit to decide on how best to address the issue of climate change, one of the most contentious on the political agenda? The BBC observed this morning that this was something that Extinction Rebellion had been calling for. And that this had already been used
There was a spat the other week about a children’s book, Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court, which is about an encounter between a little girl called Ama and the nation’s pin-up, Brenda Hale. The book’s author is the Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch. It’s written in vague rhyming couplets with the worst
Oh God. Is there no end to this madness? The fate of Jamie Griffiths is now known: he’s the teenager who touched – not groped – a girl he liked on two separate occasions last November on the arm and hip. The teenager was charged with sexual assault and now he’s been found guilty at Manchester and
Short of a miracle, abortion will become legal in Northern Ireland tomorrow. It’s a result of a shabby legislative deal back in July, when English parliamentarians amended the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) bill, to override the entire principle of devolution. In other words, the abortion laws of the north of Ireland will be annulled at the say-so
So after Tom Bradby’s documentary on Harry and Meghan: An African Journey last night, what are people talking about? The mines issue, 22 years after Diana walked through a minefield in Angola? Violence against women and girls in South Africa, as evident in the training that girls get to help them fend off attacks, which
We saw two different worlds, or at least two different value systems, collide in the High Court in Birmingham this week. On one side there was Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, the headmistress of Anderton Park, a little primary school in Sparkhill, a largely Pakistani bit of the city; on the other, two men who represent Muslim parents
There’s a cultural problem at the BBC, isn’t there? The Corporation is trying to attract under-35s — the sort who don’t really listen to scheduled radio programmes and who probably listen, if to anything from the BBC at all, to Radio 5 Live. This is the most obvious way to explain what’s happened to Desert
