Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
Unlike Pope Francis I can’t actually remember when I consciously gave up television and I have in fact watched it occasionally in other people’s houses on various occasions. But it was probably at least as long ago as he, twenty odd years ago. When I went to university there wasn’t a television in our room and there
In more ways than one it’s impossible to be heard above the din right now in the wake of the Yes vote in Ireland on gay marriage. There’s a special noise that goes with an orgy of self-congratulation, a roar of mutual approbation, and it drowned everything else out in Dublin as the results came
In what sense, precisely, has a bakery in County Antrim contravened discrimination law by refusing to ice a cake with a gay marriage slogan on it? The ‘gay cake’ case does have the useful function of identifying the partisan and idiot character of the Equality Commission, in this case, of Northern Ireland, which acted for gay
You know, I’m not sure the new, in-by-a-squeak Tory MP for Croydon, Gavin Barwell, has quite got it right when he says that ‘London is turning into Paris’, what with the rich dominating the centre and the poor pushed to the suburbs. If only. Obviously, it’s true that there’s a species of social cleansing going
A Telegraph journalist, Lucy Denyer, has written about how rubbish it is that people are calling their children stupid, made-up names. (Spoiler alert: I’m anti stupid made-up names.) Trouble is, while she hasn’t exactly gone the Fifi Trixibelle/Peaches route herself, she has called her son Atticus. And no, it’s not the friend of Cicero she had
Bit of Kant, bit of Kierkegaard, bit of motorcycle maintenance. That’s one take on The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford’s philosophical polemic about how virtual reality is impinging on real reality. Actually, his targets in this book are Descartes and John Locke, with whom, he reckons, the rot started when it comes to thinking
Beatrice Elizabeth Mary. Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise. Elizabeth Alexandra Mary. These are the full baptismal names of Princesses Beatrice, Princess Anne and the Queen respectively. And what use are any of them other than the first one in each case? Today the papers have worked themselves up into a state of mild hysteria over the
Every morning on the way to work I pass a group of Polish builders waiting to start work on the new Design Museum. I know, it tells us a great deal about the availability of British youth for work in construction that every last one of them is Polish, so far as I can make out
Can there be anyone curmudgeonly enough to take against Save the Children’s Den Day, a heartwarming event? – actually, make that an entire week, 29 May to 6th June – in which little children are ‘being sponsored to transform their sofa, school desk or even a boring cardboard box into magical super dens. And the money
If I were a nicer person, I suppose I’d have been rather more moved by what the Independent called the moment that summed up last night’s leaders debate, the ‘beautiful group hug’ by the three women leaders at the end while Ed Miliband looked on. Rather, it summed up for me what I felt about the entire
It’s not perhaps the first thing you notice in the Labour manifesto, but one interesting commitment by the party is to establish a Global Envoy for Religious Freedom. It may or may not be an indication that Douglas Alexander reads The Spectator – which suggested some time ago that Britain should, like Canada, have a
Go to any bookshop — always supposing you’re fortunate enough to have any left in your neck of the woods — and chances are that lots of window space will be given over to two genres — children’s books and cookbooks. Step inside, and the children’s books are under your nose. Last year, children’s books
Granted, you don’t really expect foreign policy to feature much in an election campaign – we’re not saints – but it’s still shaming the way that the biggest foreign policy issue simply doesn’t register on the radar right now. I refer obviously to Islamic State, the group that just keeps on giving when it comes
Fair play to Ed Miliband for launching Labour’s business manifesto today in Bloomberg, not perhaps the party’s natural stamping ground, at least not since the prawn cocktail initiative in 1997. And it was gutsy of it too to take out a full page advertisement in the FT – they don’t come cheap – to broadcast
Nice to know, isn’t it, that public attitudes are finally catching up with MPs’? It seems, from the Social Attitudes survey, that finally, half a century after parliament suspended the death penalty, 48 per cent of people no longer want the death penalty reintroduced. Opinion has been stubbornly in favour of it ever since 1965,
My father was handed over a shop counter when he was a day old. His aunt had tried to pass him off to a hospital and couldn’t find any takers so she brought him into a draper’s shop, put him down on the counter and declared she didn’t know what she was going to do
Thank God for Dolce and Gabbana. Where other fashion designers play with their image like Mr Benn, the children’s character who adopts a different persona every time he changes his hat, they have a remarkably consistent – for fashion – way of looking at the world. It’s about family, the kind of families they had,
Imagine a party that’s a cross between the SNP, Syriza and Ukip – one that is anti-establishment and combines the self-regard of the plucky outsider with an intermittent lead in the opinion polls. Imagine that and you’re getting close to the character of Sinn Féin, as manifest in its party conference this weekend. The last you
There’s a vision of hell tucked away in the serious case review, commissioned by Maggie Blyth, independent chair of the Oxfordshire safeguarding children board. According to its reckoning some 373 girls were sexually exploited across Oxfordshire in the past 15 years. The review doesn’t quite do justice to the horrors of the ‘sexual torture’ and
Pope Francis, is, according to Cardinal Walter Kasper – a Swabian formerly responsible for ecumenism – neither a traditionalist nor a liberal – “both of which categories have become rather timeworn and hackneyed” – but rather a radical who wants to advance a revolution of forgiveness. Well, that’s what Christians are kind of for, even
