Category Archives: Features

“Welcome to life at The Irish Independent” – how Ireland’s best-selling newspaper embraced “L’Ethica dela New of the World”

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Print journalists need three things.

First, a passion for the truth, second a concern for people and third a reasonable command of language.

For those that haven’t heard, on Wednesday Ireland’s best-selling daily newspaper The Irish Independent printed an article about a Polish lady living in Ireland.

image source: broadsheet.ie

The source of their piece was the Gazeta Wyborcza, a Polish newspaper, which had been running features about life in recessionary Europe.

In the original article, “Magda” spoke about her life in Ireland and the state benefit she has received since losing her job.

The Irish Independent titled its piece “Welcome to ‘good life’ on welfare: how Polish waitress embraced La Dol-ce Vita”.

In the original Polish article, Magda says of being on benefits: “I don’t want to live off the state, that’s why I treat the benefits as an aid, which will help me to start my own business.”

On budgeting, she says:

“Once every two months I pay for electricity, that’s around 100 euro. I cook at home, I don’t go out to restaurants. I go to the market where I can get local products cheaper than in a shop. I look for special offers in Centra – for example 6 rolls for 1.50 euro. … I buy my clothes in Penney’s … but not too many, because I don’t have the need to glam myself up. My latest buys: yoga sweatpants for a euro, trousers for 7 … I buy my shoes in TK Maxx – max 10 euro per pair. In the autumn I get a winter clothing allowance … I look for books in a charity shop. Look: ‘The Jungle Book’, ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Out of the Silent Planet’ by C.S. Lewis – all three for 2.50 euro.”

The Independent article reads “A Polish waitress living here has sparked fury after she boasted about living the good life on Irish welfare benefits”

Magda’s welfare benefits entitle her to take courses to increase her skills. According to the original article, “Magda can do a basic massage, a Hawaiian one and a hot stone one that she’s learnt at a free course organised by the social welfare office.”

The Independent’s version reads “‘Magda’ (36), not her real name, described her life on the dole in Donegal as a ‘Hawaiian massage’”. It also claims that she “revealed how she had packed in her job so she could spend her days walking along beaches with her partner” and sometimes sleeps till noon.

The original says ““I always start my days in the same way: I go down to the beach to see the sunrise. It sets me up for the rest of the day. I used to sleep until noon, but now I don’t want to waste my life.”

The Independent quotes Labour senator Jimmy Harte, who describes the claims as “outrageous” and adds that he’d “gladly pay for her flight home”.

Thanks to the John Murray Show on RTE, which commissioned an accurate translation of the text, the Irish Independent has been exposed for falsification and misrepresentation.
Its response today was tragic and even comical:

“YESTERDAY’S story about a Polish woman living on welfare payments in Ireland sparked much discussion and controversy.”

It could have been a parody on its opening from yesterday which claimed that the same story had “sparked fury”.

Its only admission of wrongdoing is the acknowledgement that “Some parts of the original interview, on which the story was based, were inaccurately translated.” It then provides a translation of the original, which it describes as “fuller”, as if its version had been missing body rather than fact.

It may seem obvious but to journalists Greg Harkin and Norma Costello it was not: the function of a newspaper is to offer responses to real events rather than elicit reactions to fabricated ones.

Even more obviously perhaps, newspapers are not storybooks. We expect them to tell the truth.

News reporting is retrospective, not prescient. It cannot claim something before it has happened.

If a Polish lady’s claims have “sparked fury” and “ignited a debate about welfare tourism”, we need evidence beyond the comments of an unfortunate local Senator who has been lied to.

Should Greg Harkin and Norma Costello fall victim to unemployment, they may do readers the courtesy of polishing up on their Polish. Perhaps Magda could recommend a good FÁS course, or better, teach them herself.

When interviewed on the radio this morning she spoke perfect English with a slight hint of a Donegal lilt.

Armpit hair or the Eurozone crisis? The writer’s dilemma

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I met a girl once who let her armpit hair grow nice and bushy so that she could weed out the guys that were more interested in her grooming habits than her intellect. I thought of her yesterday as I was killing time flicking through the bestsellers in Easons. I’d picked up Caitlin Moran’s How to be a woman and happened upon a passage outlining the importance of maintaining a fine balance between the cultivation and removal of excess pubic hair. Apparently, girls as young as 12 are now seeking full body waxes. Furthermore, young boys’ exposure to porn means that they’re unfamiliar with the follicle reality of the female anatomy, which shocks them upon their first real encounter with it.

The things you learn.

I was conscious that it had been nearly a week since my last post and even though popular science dictates that the third week in January presents the greatest statistical probability of lapsing on your New Year’s Resolutions, I was determined to buck the trend and continue blogging.

So I thought about writing about bodily hair; about how I’ll be damned if I shave my legs in the winter, or about how I got my eyebrows threaded last June and that though it was very painful and my eyes were watering like a hose, when the beautician asked me if I was alright I answered that I was doing just fine and that the streaks of mascara decorating my cheeks were intentional.

But I thought the better of it. After all, there are more important things to be worrying about than the state of the nation’s armpits. I resolved to educate myself on a more sober theme.

As a result, I spent much of today in solitary confinement; having decided that I wanted to be someone who writes about the things that matter, rather than the colonies that fester in secret under our nation’s arms.

It didn’t take me long to find a suitable treatise.

With the stealth of a long-repressed id, the Eurozone crisis reared its ugly head from the back of my mind, where I had shoved it to avoid returning to the shameful and possibly unalterable fact that I don’t understand economics.

I began by googling promising terms like “Eurozone crisis”, “structure of European banking system” and “austerity”.

I decided it would be only right to set myself a plausible-sounding essay title to focus my enquiries.

I came up with “Outline the causes of the Eurozone crisis and discuss potential outcomes of Government measures to tackle the crisis”, which I thought sounded promising.

Like most academic titles, it was embedded with the code “Write anything you know about this theme and don’t forget to reference several bizarrely named academics to make the whole process a bit more bearable”.

I skimmed through a few generalities and familiarised myself with key Eurozone celebs like Hosé Manuel Barosso, Christine Lagarde and Evangelos Venizelos. I even recorded the duller-sounding names in a notebook for future perusal.

image source: guardian.co.uk


I thought I’d hit the jackpot when I happened upon the BBC’s Crisis Jargon Buster. I rushed downstairs to make myself a cup of mint tea, took a deep breath, then spent the entire day reading the list of terms and taking notes, which I intend to copy into the desktop folder I have called “My general betterment”.

As it turns out, the crisis is not without its gratifying terms. So much so, that when LSB picked me up this evening, we whiled away a pleasant half hour making economy-related puns over our cappuccinos.

I asked him if he could guess what my new favourite cereal was. Though he’s a savant, he was stumped. He knew that it used to be Aldi’s own-brand strawberry crisp but I told him that was old news.

My morning victual of choice was now … “Credit crunch”.

His groan was nothing on the one I had let out when I reached the letter “H” in the jargon buster glossary. Wedged defiantly between “Glass-Steagall” and “Hedge fund” was the word “haircut”.

And it didn’t refer to armpits.

Such are the dilemmas I’m facing as I embark on another year of blogging. Do I write about my savant boyfriend, who generates hundreds of hits, or about the war in Iraq or the meaning of “art” , which fewer people want to read about?

Should journalists give the public what it should want, or what it does want? Is it more important to inform or to entertain?

What do you think?

How the Iron Lady boils an egg: why private moments matter in politics

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If I learnt just one thing from watching The Iron Lady, it’s that despite popular belief, politicians are people too. Margaret Thatcher might have sent missile ships to the Falklands and vowed never to negotiate with terrorists, but she still boils an egg, fills black sacks for Oxfam and asks her daughter to fasten the catch at the back of her dress which she can’t reach.

The snippets of Maggie’s domestic life are definitely the most moving parts of the film (which, in case you are wondering I would highly recommend). It’s impossible not to feel something as you watch the forgetful but resolute old lady plonked awkwardly on the floor in an uncomfortable cotton dress, trying to prise open a DVD case and twitching as she eavesdrops on conversations her daughter has with her carer.

It made me think that if Britain has its iron lady in ‘Maggie’, then Germany has found her equivalent in ‘Angie’.

Like Thatcher, Merkel is frequently portrayed as emotionless and inexpressive and ultimately, as Maggie was, “out of touch”.

A recent article published on Spiegel Online seeks to redress the balance. In it, journalist Dirk Kurbjuweit, who has spent many years accompanying Merkel on her trips, documents a series of moments, unrelated to the financial crisis, nuclear power, or the future of the Euro, in which Merkel shows herself as something more than a political machine.

As a Human Being in fact.

They are ordinary moments.

Once, she laughed uncontrollably and snorted while telling a story about the Lithuanian Prime Minister, who was detained by the Belarusian police while out cycling disguised as a tourist.

Another time, after her defence minister Guttenberg resigned following revelations that he had plagiarised passages of his doctoral thesis, she made an uncharacteristically emotional speech. During it, she kept tugging at a loose thread on her sleeve.

She makes her husband breakfast every morning.

Some, especially the French, might inquire as to why on earth it matters what a politician does behind closed doors. Can they not sew their buttons in peace? Have they not got the right to entertain several lovers without the world having to know about it?

The French media in particular thinks personal privacy is sacrosanct.

Back in November, at the G20 summit Obama and Sarkozy were having a chat. The Israeli Prime Minister came up in conversation.

“I can’t stand him anymore, he’s a liar”, said Sarkozy, to which Obama replied, “You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day!”

The problem with the conversation was that their mikes were on. A couple of journalists heard the whole thing. Instead of rushing to their editor with their enormous scoop, they stayed quiet, in the belief that this was a private conversation, and would be damaging to report.

Nothing was said for a few days until the French website Arret sur Images published their remarks. As soon as international journalists got their hands on the clip, it went global and the mainstream French media reported it too.

Why is this important?

Because it reinforces the point that politics is a drama encompassing the full spectrum of human emotions.

We must never forget that it’s the behind-the-scenes conversations over strong cups of coffee and dog-eared files that end up directing events on the world stage.

Political decisions, like any other are made on the spur of the moment, and under the influence of powerful personalities. If your leader is more eager to be liked than to do what’s right, it matters. If they are impulsive or inexpressive or icy, it will affect their governance. Personality counts.

It’s one thing to believe in protecting private comments from the public glare but it’s another to detach entirely the personal from the political.

Research has shown that politicians get elected on the strength of their personality rather than on their policies.

It’s not surprising.

People are interested in people. They are less interested in policies. Policies may be more important, but ultimately it’s people, not machines that make them.

It’s futile to remove the personal from the political. We can rationalise emotions but we can’t remove them. Margaret Thatcher’s style of governance was probably affected a great deal more by the values of her stiff-upper lip upbringing than by the pages of briefs and pieces of advice she got from various channels during her premiership.

The media have a choice to make between objectifying and subjectifying. Objectifying is talking about Hillary Clinton’s bum, while subjectifying is telling us how her mouth twitched when her daughter failed a maths test.

The future of journalism is uncertain: the overwhelming speed at which news now travels has eliminated much of what the job used to entail.

There is a new opportunity though and it requires us to slow down, to reflect and to write with insight rather than haste.

Demanding of our journalists to be emotionally astute as well as politically sharp will lead to a more complex picture of what is anything but a straightforward job: making decisions that affect millions of lives and the future of our planet.

Journalism may sustain its integrity into the future by maintaining a fine balance between the personal and the political. When it comes to reporting from the private realm, it must replace sensationalism with psychological realism.

It’s what’s missing in the constantly updated, hyper-evolving virtual media landscape.

Unless we begin to privilege the mundane everyday, politicians will stay “out of touch” with it, and the public will continue to see them as little more than worn out political machines; inanimate and inept.

How Maggie boils an egg matters, but you’d really better go and see the film to find out.

On being a creepface

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I have the unfortunate habit of staring for long periods of time at strangers I find interesting. Conditions in early childhood encouraged the practice. My bedroom was at the very top of the house facing a busy park and a bus stop. From there I could observe ladies in leggings and ear muffs making their way to the shops and groups of children trying in vain to retrieve shuttlecocks they had misfired into trees.

Sometimes I would sit for so long by the window that I could see the ladies return with their Dunnes Stores shopping bags. It always gave me satisfaction to note the details, like that they’d removed their ear muffs and bought a stick of French bread or two packets of toilet paper.

Some people are interested in living life but I am surprisingly content just to look at it. When I was young, I used to find it fascinating to watch my sister play with her playmobil. She’d set up her toy ambulance, or farmhouse or schoolroom and assign names to each of the playmobil figurines, which she recorded in a special little book which I have preserved for posterity.

She became a scientist; I studied Psychology.

I don’t watch much television because my parents are always watching the Bavarian news or German documentaries about the Pope. When I get the chance though I love to watch people watching television.

My favourite person to watch is my mother.

When she has time, my mother watches sentimental German films, which feature families that seem to making a wholesome livelihood milking cows and running hotels in the Alps, but inwardly battling with deep-seated problems like long-lost loves and corruption in the bovine trade.

In the last thirty minutes of such dramas, my mother’s face changes. As conflicts reach their climax, and true thoughts are expressed, her lips begin to move a little, her eyes grow bigger and she can’t stop the tears that begin to roll one-by-one down her cheeks.

When I turn to look at her, she gets embarrassed and flashes me a sheepish smile. I pretend I haven’t noticed even though she should really know by now that her indiscriminate display of empathy is among the billions of things I admire about her and that her compassion for villagers in complicated love triangles is endearing.

My father’s expression becomes exceptionally benign when he watches trains bounding through glorious British countryside and stuffy antique shows where soft-spoken elderly males evaluate the worth of a 1786 gold-plated pocket watch.

In a domestic context, my bad habit doesn’t get me into too much trouble. Apart from the odd bus passenger sitting on the top deck, whose eye I catch as he’s looking out the window into my bedroom, I seem to keep my creeping quite covert.

It’s different when you’re on the luas though, or taking the bus. That’s a riskier business altogether. There you have to be careful. You see, I find observing people on public transport an indescribabe, insatiable delight. I frequently select my seat on the basis of maximum viewing potential.

The other day a south Dublin boy with a voice several decibels louder than the roar of the engine was making arrangements with his friend on the phone.

“Get us a mixer for tonishe will you”, he yelled. “I’ve got lieke three bottles of vodka but I toshally forgot the OJ in Londis. Ish’s going to be SUCH a laugh tonishe…. Definitely. You’re a star…Definitely. Such a laugh.”

He was speaking with such affectation and lack of self-consciousness that a man at the front of the bus turned around in disgust and stared at him for the duration of his entire conversation, and then again when his friend Lola rang back.

Unfortunately the man who turned had spotted me giggling into my scarf and tried to catch my eye. I didn’t want to catch his eye in case he thought I was only laughing because I wanted to share a special moment with him alone.

Once I was coming home on the last Luas and a group of drunk youngsters were amusing me with their unfathomable babble.

I was the tiniest bit tipsy so my subtlety was at an all-time low. I was caught.

“How are you tonight?” the one sporting a pink shirt with an upturned collar asked me.
“Very well”, I beamed.
“ Where are you from”, he asked.
“Bavaria”.
“Is that in Australia?”
“Yes! How did you know?”
“I’ve been there. It’s a beautiful place”
“It is! I love it there”
“People from there are so sound”
“I know, they so are! – Sorry, this is my stop”
“BYE darling! See you in Bavaria!”
“Bye now!”

When I got home, I turned off the bedroom light. As I was closing the curtains, I took a steely glance out at the quiet street below. I saw a couple kissing by the park railings. And I watched a man cycling by, singing to himself.

The reality of working in retail

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Toeing the Line

Pippa’s feet hurt. They’re wedged in narrow pumps and she’s been on them all day. She’s moving between the till and a number of milling customers, which include a formidable lady in her forties sporting a mass of auburn curls and examining a pair of shiny black boots. “D’you have them in a thirty-nine?” she calls over, waving the article at her. “I’ll just check for you now”, Pippa says, issuing a receipt and handing the customer at the till her bag before returning to the lady.

While she’s in the stockroom, Pippa’s colleague appears, her head barely visible beneath the enormous tower of shoeboxes she’s carrying. “Deliveries just in”, she whispers as Pippa emerges with the boots in a thirty-nine. “Oh, God”, Pippa gasps looking at the mountain of boxes growing in front of her.

Meanwhile, the lady has begun tapping her foot. Pippa hastens over. “Hi there. I’m really sorry for the delay. Unfortunately, we only seem to have size 39 in navy..” The lady purses her lips. “Is that right?”
“Yes, unfortunately. But I can check with our other branch to see if they have them in stock”.
She blinks a few times. “Alright, check”.

Pippa goes to the phone behind the till but there’s already another customer waiting to buy a pair of shocking-pink heels. “Sorry for keeping you”, she says taking the box and commenting, “they’re gorgeous” as she drops them into a plush black carrier bag. Transaction complete, she calls the other branch and dodges around the heap of boxes her colleague is sorting. On the way, another customer taps her on the shoulder.
“Are these leather?”
“They wouldn’t be entirely leather”, Pippa replies apologetically. “but they’re leather-lined”.
Back with the lady now, Pippa explains that she branch ten minutes away has the black boot in size 39 in stock.
The lady shakes her head vigorously; “Oh, I just can’t face the walk!”
“Or I could order them in for you?”, Pippa suggests.
The lady takes another look at the boot, with its glittery heel and floppy leg and puts it down. “I’ll leave it”.

“No problem”, says Pippa brightly, packing it back into its tissue wrapping and returning it to the stockroom upstairs. Her colleague is now up at the till dealing with a man who is demanding a refund for a shoe his daughter damaged while out dancing. As soon as he’s gone, Pippa’s colleague calls over to her and says “hey, go on your lunch, you haven’t even had a break”.

Pippa takes a look at the heap of boxes, at the group of shrieking friends who’ve just come in looking for matching stilettos to wear to a hen night and at the accounts that are yet to be filled in. The sales target figure her boss has given her seems alarmingly out of reach. Rocking Around the Christmas Tree comes on again. “I can’t”, she says.

Living on a shoestring

Pippa has been working in the shoe shop for the last year and a half. She’s got a Master’s Degree and worked part-time all through college. She’s one of the 216,229 retail workers in Ireland and part of a growing number of graduates entering the sector.

Like many others retail employees, Pippa’s work conditions are poor. She splits her time between the various branches of the shop and frequently runs the smaller outlets with no help. “It’s a nine-hour shift, on my own, with no break”, she says.

Quite apart from compromising safety, such conditions represent a breach of the law, which states “Shop employees who work more than 6 hours and whose hours of work include 11.30am-2.30pm are entitled to a one hour consecutive break which must occur during those hours”. Furthermore and rather curiously, retail workers in the Footwear and Drapery trade in Dublin only “are entitled to a 15-minute paid break (exclusive of the main meal break) if working more than 4 ½ hours.” Taking into account the amount of work she does and her experience, Pippa feels that she “could do with getting more than nine euro an hour at this stage”.

To add insult to injury, Pippa is not allowed to wear her own shoes but is instead forced to wear footwear that the shop stocks, for which she must pay out of her own wages. She finds them uncomfortable and permanently suffers from blisters. “I have wide feet”, she explains and “because of that these type of shoes hurt”. The one time she dared to come in to work in her own shoes, she was shouted at by her manager. “She just went crazy”, Pippa remembers.

Fear of managers and bosses is widespread among the workers I speak to. “It’s just a lack of respect”, one girl tells me. “We’re dispensable, so they can afford to treat us badly”. Pippa is used to being shouted at. Of her manager she says, “She has been horrible to me on many occasions, but, to be honest, it’s just her manner with you, and a build up of little things, which over time, would have your confidence in ribbons!” she says, adding, “everybody is scared of her”. On the week I pop by, she has been made cry twice by her employer, which Pippa describes as a “new record”.

Image source journal.ie

“We’re just the Christmas slaves”

Wendy, also a graduate worked her sixth Christmas in retail this year. “In the three weeks before Christmas I worked 16 late shifts; they included 2pm-11pm and 2.30pm-12.00am. There were a few consecutive days where I did not even see daylight. I would come home from work at 12.30am, finally wind down to sleep at 3.00am, wake up at 1.00pm to get to work by 2.30pm … I lived like a vampire, microwave meals became my everyday dinner; eating a home cooked meal was a rarity … My sleeping pattern has become alarming and now that the Christmas rush is over all of us on our staff are suffering with colds, infections and the flu from being so run down and stressed. All because people want to shop at 11pm at night … I remember on one occasion finishing at 12.15am, heading home to bed and my alarm going off at 5.30am to be in the store by 7am: all for minimum wage.”

“Nobody thinks about us”, she says “we’re just the Christmas slaves to the shoppers”.
Compared to other years though this Christmas has not been the worst for Wendy: “The years I worked in fashion retail at Christmas were hell but selling face creams and body lotions is pretty straightforward”.

Short-staffing and Dispensability

The problem of short staffing is widespread in the retail sector. With employers taking on fewer staff, individual workers are forced to work longer hours and to go beyond their prescribed duty. The scramble for vacancies makes employees less likely to speak out against their employers’ malpractices, for fear of losing their job to the ever-growing queue of people hoping to take it. The participation of shops in the Government Job Bridge Scheme, which pays interns €50 on top of their weekly social welfare allowance to work for a period of up to nine months, further restricts the number of workers hoping to get paid minimum wage for doing the job.

Experiences with customers: a mixed bag

Mandate, the third largest trade union in Ireland represents 40,000 workers, the majority of which are employed in major retail companies. In 2009 it launched its Respect Retail Workers Campaign following a survey it carried out on twenty retail businesses and their employees, which found that 74% of workers had received verbal threats from customers in the past year and almost 10% had been assaulted by a customer in the course of their employment.

For Pippa, encounters with customers have been varied “Experiences with customers can be really lovely and make you feel very appreciated and like you have helped someone in some little way, even if it is just by lending them an ear; other times, it can be hell!”

Wendy agrees, “Honestly customers were not so bad this year … but of course there were the people who argued over 20 cent for a gift wrap bag that went to charity and the man who wanted money off for buying three things”.

Employees of smaller business losing out

For the thousands of retail workers employed by smaller businesses who are not part of a union, bringing change about is a difficult, risky process. Speaking out threatens to damage relations with colleagues as well as prospects of promotion. The “At least I have a job” mantra appears to be the guiding principle behind silent, gritted teeth and stoic continuance.

As for work being valued, according to Pippa, “Nothing I’ve seen or heard would really suggest it. It’s a tiring job at first, but you do get used to it. Emotionally it can be awful at times, but the people around me are lovely. It’s nice to be working around people my age, who can pick you up when you are down”.

As for the employers, who are supplied with an ever-increasing number of staff faced with little choice but to work in poor conditions, a change in behaviour is bound to come from above rather than below. For the Government, that means enforcing and checking on the written records employers are required to keep of hours worked, to impose the maximum fine of €1,900 on employers who fail to co-operate with it and to monitor the Job Bridge Scheme to make sure that it introduces more, not fewer paid workers into the sector.

What do you think? Have you ever worked in retail? Do shop workers have it tougher than most?

My boyfriend is a savant

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My boyfriend is a savant. He can multiply enormous numbers by each other in seconds and can list the members of my expansive German family in order of age without ever having been formally taught. He can recall facts about obscure historical figures I’ve never heard of and whenever we share a book to read, I have to skip paragraphs to keep up with his page turning.

Of course he denies it. He shakes his head with a bemused smile, masking the beginnings of faint frustration and says, “I’m not a savant, Katzi”. Then I ask him to multiply 678 by 78 and he says “52,884”.

“Is it really?”
“I think so”, he replies modestly.
I check it on my phone. He’s always right. I have found that he finds it difficult to refuse an offer to compute.

Being a savant’s girlfriend has its complications. One becomes idle. Instead of whipping out a calculator, or typing something into Google, or even better lifting one of my enormous encyclopaedias, I call him.

Another problem I have found is that it is extremely difficult to find a fault or defect to offset the genius quality. As well as knowing lots, he’s also unbearably humble.

The difference between us is that I don’t like to let the facts get in the way of a good diagnosis. I understand that according to the Strict Diagnostic criteria, LSB unfortunately does not qualify as a savant. However, this does not stop me from addressing text messages to him with “What’s up, Savantface?”

In an effort to refute my hypothesis, this Christmas he gave me a book with the title “Islands of Genius” with a foreword written by my hero Daniel Tammet. I fear he thought that reason was the way to a change of heart. This book, like most academic works, disguises interesting and insightful points with dull prose.

Peculiarly, though I received it last week, the inside cover claims it to have been “first published in 2012”. I see this as nothing more than further evidence of LSB’s preternatural processing speed.

Why Ireland must ban smacking children

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Texan judge William Adams enters his daughter’s bedroom. On the wall next to the computer in the corner is a poster of Bart Simpson writing lines on a blackboard. In front of Judge Adams is his daughter’s bed, covered in a red and black spread.

His daughter Hillary is wearing thin grey pants and what looks like a pyjama top.
“Bend over the bed”, he says, quietly in his southern drawl, “Bend over the bed”. She’s whimpering now. “No. Dad”, she pleads.
“BEND OVER THE BED”.

He’s swinging a belt.

He thrashes her on her thighs before shouting once more “BEND OVER THE BED”.

She folds herself over the bed. She’s cowering, weeping, screaming. He keeps thrashing her. Crack, crack, crack. She’s flailing so he presses down on her back, to force her onto her stomach. He strikes her again and again and again.

He moves away. She sits up. Her shoulders continue to jerk forward; still flinching from the attack. She starts wailing. Her father stands before her and regards her for a second. Then he lashes out again. With each crack of the blow, there’s a gasp as she tries to find air. Her mother, from the corner of the room watches on and tells her daughter to “take it … like a grown woman”.

Hillary’s crime was to download music illegally from the internet.

The abuse continues for six minutes. The footage emerged in November when Hillary, who had secretly set up a webcam in her room to record her father’s ongoing abuse decided to release in on the internet.

Though he’s being investigated, there’s a good chance that William Adams won’t be held to account for his actions because of the time that has elapsed since his crime; the footage was taken in November 2004 when Hillary was 16. Judge Adams and Hillary’s mother have since split up, the latter claiming that she was”completely brainwashed and controlled” in her marriage. Hillary and her mother now have a good relationship and have appeared on chat shows together.

I found it impossible to watch the full seven- minute clip posted below but I forced myself to watch enough to decide that what Judge Adams did was a disgusting crime deserving of a prison sentence. Alarmingly, there are many who, having watched the same clip, disagree that Adams is even guilty of abuse.

While Judge Adams was abusing rather than ‘spanking’ his child, the case illustrates why it is socially important and morally necessary to protect children under law.

The Minister for Children, Frances Fitzgerald is considering bringing in a blanket ban on smacking children.

She should do so as soon as possible.

Most of the generation before me was beaten. Many were sexually abused.

In Ireland today, parents still smack their children in the middle of the street.

The purpose of a law is to create a boundary of social propriety. Broadly speaking, when a democratic society prohibits something, it sends a signal out about what is right and wrong.

Smacking children is wrong. It is not necessarily abusive, or worthy of criminal pursuit but it is still wrong.

Many who were smacked grow up to say “well, it never did me any harm”. Many of them use this as an excuse to smack their own children, claiming that “spare the rod, spoil the child”.

There is no evidence to suggest that smacking a child is beneficial. As children develop, they learn to model their behaviour on that of the people around them. Researchers have found that children who are smacked are more likely to grow up to be violent themselves.

Smacking a child is a poor parental strategy. It is a lazy, uncreative way to stop undesirable behaviour and leads to long-term damage to both parent and child.

I have heard the weak argument expressed that children under three have failed to reach the “age of reason” and can therefore only respond to discipline in the form of corporal punishment.

While it is tself highly contestable that children under the age of three cannot “reason”, this argument falls through because it is certain that children from the moment they enter the world, copy the behaviour of the people around them. Unless violence is desirable, children’s exposure to it should be prohibited.

Supposing a toddler lacks the capacity to understand that throwing food from their high chair is wrong. If he or she is smacked, they still don’t make the connection. Instead they learn that when their parents are upset, or angry, they respond by lashing out.

“But what if a child is running into the middle of the road and a car is coming and you lash out to stop them?” I hear people cry.

This is okay, you will not be prosecuted.

This is an uncomfortable topic for plenty of people. Many ‘good’ parents smack their children and admittedly the long-term damage might be minimal. Nevertheless, the message is ineffective and the means in itself infantile and unsophisticated.

Parenting is not easy. The temptation to smack will arise. In the majority of cases, at least a handful of smacks will be administered.

Where the law comes in is in changing perceptions. The fact that many people in America and beyond can watch a video as horrendous as that of Judge Adams’ assault of his daughter and claim that it doesn’t constitute abuse is utterly alarming.

It shows that laws – like parents – must set clear boundaries. Physical punishment is wrong. Apart from the unusual case where a child is innately violent (not having learnt the behaviour) and when a parent must use force in self -defence, it is unambiguously unacceptable.

In eighteen of the forty-seven member states of the Council of Europe, it is illegal to inflict physical punishment on children in all settings, including the home.

According to the Irish Times, enforcing the same ban here is problematic because of the constitutional guarantees afforded the family.

It is ironic that in an attempt to protect a child from an abusive family, the rights of that same family could be infringed. It is the same kind of logic that protected the institution of the church over the abuses it perpetrated against its flock.

Unfortunate back story? YOU could be the next big thing!

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A couple of weeks ago, I had the misfortune of watching “Germany’s Got Talent”. It wasn’t my choice; I was babysitting and the parents had decreed it. The three children had permission to watch the show provided they ate up their salami baguettes and promised to be in bed by 9.30 pm. As I tossed salami slices onto their French sticks, I prayed for a hunger strike, but it was all in vain: they tore through the bread and the youngest even asked for seconds.

If its British counterpart is objectionable, Germany’s Got Talent is downright offensive. It’s even more slow-moving and features considerably more sexually provocative performances and an unacceptably broad definition of talent.

I asked the children whom they were rooting for. “The piano player” they answered. Oh, how nice!

Turns out he’s a Brazilian-German with a red Mohawk known as “Punker Jorg” who’s been up to no good; for the last few years he’s been living on the streets and getting in trouble with the police. Somewhere along the way, he started playing Yann Tiersen songs on the keyboard and now he wants to turn his life around. We see some teary tributes from his grandmother and an emotional appeal from his family to quit his path to self-destruction.


Before he performs we must watch a Russian lady showing off her uncanny ability to change outfits in seconds while covered by a sheet her husband drapes over her; an unfortunate man who is besotted with the main judge, whom he describes as his idol; and a blind lady whose dog sits beside her panting as she sings.

The kids’ eyes get bigger and bigger with each story of an unfortunate life about to be transformed by a winning performance.

This all came back to me tonight because I stumbled upon a clip of Korea’s Got Talent on youtube. Sung-Bong Choi is 22 and was abandoned as a child. He’s spent his life working on the street selling gum and sometimes the public toilets are the only shelter he can get.

One night he’s in a nightclub selling gum when he hears a vocalist performing with such emotion that he decides he wants to sing too and turn his life around. Korea’s Cheryl Cole gazes at him with adoring pity while the camera pans out to audience members, who are wearing uniform expressions of patronising compassion.

Sung Bo, self-contained and humble starts to sing and the crowd goes wild. Cue millions of youtube hits: the boy goes viral and he’s the next Susan Boyle (with that name, he has to be).

Well-intentioned youtube comments beneath videos of this kind remind us “not to judge people by their looks” and thank the Su Bos of the world for having talent despite adverse life circumstances and lack of physical attractiveness.

They’re called “feel-good” videos and they travel around the world in seconds and bring tears to people’s eyes, which they then tweet about with a link back to the video.

Pity that these superstar moments rely on the gross assumption that talent and good looks and fortune are usually correlated and where this is not the case it’s legitimate to make an enormous deal out of it.

Much to the kids’ disappointment, Punker Jorg doesn’t win. An African panflautist who hasn’t been able to afford to see his family for eight years does. Magically, before his winning performance and after an elongated series of clips conveying his unfortunate life-story his mother appears on stage, having been flown over courtesy of the show to hear her son perform the melodies of his native land.

He begins to play. The pretty judge wipes a tear from her cheek with her perfect nail. He’s crowned winner and embraces his mother.

By this time, the kids’ eyes have glazed over. As I tuck them up, I ask whether next time they’d like to play make-believe “Das Supertalent” instead. They nod in excitement. When I return downstairs, I notice a piece of salami stuffed down the side of the sofa.

My left-leaning Christmas tree from Crumlin

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If there is an awkward, complicated way of accomplishing an easy task, the Ferguson family has found it. At Christmas, this means leaving buying a tree until very late and then refusing to bring the car out to transport it home. And of course refusing to buy one close by, because they can be found more cheaply further away.

This year was no different. Given that it’s only four days until Christmas, today seemed like the appropriate time to acquire a tree.

“Dad, we should get a tree”, I said stuffing a potato waffle into my mouth.
“Righteo. Let’s go”
“What, now? I’m eating!”
“We’ll leave in five.”
“FINE.”

Grabbing my coat and boots, I found my dad at the door.
“I’m cycling. Will you accompany me?”
“Nyee… No.I’m wearing a skirt.. and these boots aren’t suitable. You can wheel your bike there and then we’ll carry the tree on it in on the way home.”

He seemed to be okay with this.

Until we were making our way down the canal and he cycled off, leaving me trotting behind, fuming, resentful and futile. I chased him all the way around Harold’s Cross but we found none of the usual haunts open for business.

Dejected, we parted. I dared him to return home without a Christmas tree.

Sure enough, an hour later, I heard the gate creak open and caught a glimpse of my father’s head bopping between a mass of bushy branches.

We argued about the best way to fit the tree through the door. He heaved it all the way into the dining room, where he dumped it unceremoniously against the bookcase. “Got it in Crumlin”, he boasted before announcing he had to dash out again.

Alone now, I took a look at the specimen before me. An absolute beauty. Totally symetrical, full-bodied and tall, with a well-endowed base. This was the Beyoncé of all trees. My Papsi had done well.

The rest of my day went something like this:

I went to the garden and found a large green pot full of earth but without signs of vegetation. Armed with an enourous spade, I emptied it out and marvelled at the reflexive movements of the pinkish-blue worms which resembled varicose veins. Then I boiled several kettles of water and washed it down. My favourite part of the day happened next.

While I returned to the kitchen, I left the pot on the grass. I’d poured in some boiling water and a little cloud of steam was rising from it. When I came back, I found a robin perched at the edge of the pot, with its little red breast all puffed up and its head errect, enjoying a sauna.

I spent a long time cleaning that pot and making the acquaintance of a number of worms, who didn’t seem to want to engage in small talk with me and even, on a few occasions, phsyically recoiled with fear.

When I had finally finished, I brought the pot inside, and lined it with a collonade of bricks, which we happen to keep in our garden.

I took a firm hold of the tree and lugged it over to the window. Employing every ounce of strength my small and under-exercised frame would allow, I lifted it up and tried to jam it into the pot. It didn’t fit.

I breathed in deeply, turned on Mooney Goes Wild and relined my pot. This time it slipped in seemlessly, and, while it is now stable, it leans slightly to the left, which is a position I can identify with.

I was so happy alone in the house today, carrying one box of German Christmas decorations after the other up the stairs and unpacking it all to find it all just as I had packed it away last year. I whiled away six or seven hours dressing my full-bodied, left-leaning tree from Crumlin.

My heart did a little skip when I found my favourite decoration again. It is a little baby (probably Jesus) wrapped in a pink blanket, sleeping inside a walnut shell.

I am incredibly attached to the walnut baby. I would dispense with all our straw stars, our wooden horses, our glass presents and our golden baubles just to save this little one. It’s so simple, so lovely, so constant.

I hung it up on a protected branch near the top of the tree and this evening, in my armchair sipping a glass of spiced apple wine, I watched it swing slightly under a white light and thought that the best moment of Christmas was passing before my eyes.

The only Iraqi man I’ve ever met.

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I wrote this piece on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning when news of the withdrawal was still in the headlines. Today I clicked on to BBC news to see that co-ordinated bomb attacks in Bagdhad had killed 63 and injured around 185.

A couple of years ago, I sat opposite an Iraqi man while he cursed at me. I was volunteering with an asylum-seeker mentorship programme and I was supposed to be teaching him English. He was showing me video images of bombings in his town that he’d taken on his mobile phone. He had a brutal glare and I was scared of him. He was hissing something at me that I can’t recall. I remember his eyes were lit up and that I didn’t know what to say. There was another student at the table, fidgeting.

I thought of him when the war in Iraq was declared over last week. And then again when I listened to a commentator on Pat Kenny talk about how the withdrawal of American troops was muted, because the operation hadn’t been a success.

In 2006 the UN estimated that over one hundred Iraqi civilians a day were being killed. In the end the number for that year turned out to be 34,000, amounting to 93 per day. On a single day in November, 200 died in an attack on Baghdad. According to antiwar.com, 4484 US soldiers lost their lives since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The last fatality was on November 14, just before Thanksgiving.

And there was the suicide of David Kelly in July 2003. I remember watching the coverage of the Hutton Inquiry in my pyjamas and wondering what a “sexed-up” dossier was.

In 2006 I was starting university. I counted balancing writing essays on Jane Austen with late nights out as one of my greatest concerns. I didn’t lose sleep over the 93 a day.

And yet, like everyone else, one of my biggest fears is losing somebody I love. It’s impossible to imagine the suffering of war, the little dominoes of grief tumbling as one life after another falls to pieces.

I follow the official blog of the British troops in Afghanistan. They use a WordPress account, like this one. Every few days the death of a soldier is announced, with a short bio, featuring his or her military rank and how their death occurred. You can leave comments. People do.

It makes me realise how little I know about the world, how, against the odds, my life has occurred in a peaceful place at a peaceful time. I don’t give thanks for this often enough.

I’ve no idea if the Iraqi was granted asylum. Most likely, he’s still in a centre somewhere, awaiting his hearing and measuring his life out in insipid cantine meals.