I have looked around at humanity and I know exactly what it needs.

The Look-Up™.

A device that gets the entire human race, from about nine months old onwards, to lift its head, close its mouth and look at what is actually happening around it.

I ran this idea past some very interesting people on Saturday night and they seemed to think I was onto something. I’ll be in touch with investors.

David Sedaris is one of my favourite writers and someone I have actually seen and heard in real life in Galway, which was a great pleasure. I have read all his books. If there is a podcast he is on, I am there with all ears.

We have a few things in common, David and I. We both like litter picking and walking. He carries a notebook and observes people, places and the strange little details of everyday life.

He has also noticed something I have started noticing myself. People everywhere seem to be morphing into the same person.

Head down.

Neck down.

Mouth slightly open.

Scrolling.

So I have spent the past week walking around Galway and pulling a bit of a David Sedaris myself.

I love watching people. Buildings and landmarks are interesting, but people are the real entertainment. How they walk, greet each other, wait for buses, cross roads, flirt, argue, carry enormous bags for reasons known only to themselves.

One of the greatest non-phone activities currently available in Galway is eating a cone of chips from Chipeen, because a cone of chips requires two hands.

This could be the winning formula. Two hands occupied, eyes available and head upright. There are other excellent phone-free activities. Eating a 99, swimming and boxing.

Earlier today I was bombing up the street on my way to boxing and spotted my friend. We both locked eyes and did that little dance people do when neither person knows which direction the other is going to go.

It was lovely.

Had our heads been in our phones, we would have missed each other.

Cycling is another good one. You get to cruise around and take everything in at a lovely pace, seeing the world from a completely different perspective than you do on foot.

And then there are dogs.

A dog in an urban setting remains one of the great attention grabbers. Toby, in his little bagbed around here, gets smiles from people. He gets people looking up. For a second, the scroll stops.

A small dog has achieved what billions of euro of technology has failed to achieve.

He simply exists.

Anyway, I am so bored of the internet. Truly.

In August I have, once again, turned to fiction and reading as my little dip out of the geopolitical and social discourse of vitriol bubbling away online.

I still dip back in, of course. I can’t help myself. I like to know what is going on. I also want to support Canada and Mark Carney and those beautiful people (Kirsten PHD) in their fight against, as dear Rosie called him, Mango Mussolini.

But fiction gives me somewhere else to go.

There is something lovely about reading a book and suddenly finding a new word, or a way of saying something you have always felt but never had the words for.

Then there is getting lost in a story.

You take it with you.

You bring it into conversations.

You tell someone about a character or a sentence or an idea that stayed with you.

So perhaps I do still need The Look-Up™.

Because technically, when I am reading, my head is still down.

But at least when I look up, I might have something to say.

A trip to town was always an adventure, but there was a rhythm to it. There was a route, a reason and usually a select group of us. She drove, and we came along for the spin.

That day there were five of us in the green Mini, plus her. We were bombing along the roads I knew from cycling and walking, talking over each other, when we came to the turn. She slowed. I looked to my right.

There was a man at the front door. Dark trousers. White shirt. Hat.

I wondered who he was. Then the car kept going.

She drove straight past the house and took the right turn up the Drum Road.

“We’ll keep going,” she said.

I looked at her from the back seat.

The energy in the car had changed. Everyone was still talking, still laughing, still caught up in whatever conversation had been going on, but something had shifted. I could feel in the space between the front seats.

Nobody else seemed particularly interested. But I was.

The green Mini carried on out onto the big road, heading towards Moycullen.

I knew the road. We had been that way plenty of times, but always for matches. There was a reason for going. A time to leave. A time to come home.

This was a weekday in the middle of summer.

There was no match.

No one had mentioned Moycullen.

I watched the road ahead and waited for someone to explain.

Instead, the car carried on.

Then we pulled in somewhere and she told us all to get out.

We climbed out in a heap, with me last because I was the youngest and smallest and had to work my way out of the three-door Mini.

I emerged into the sunshine, delighted to be out of the car and hopeful that the mystery might finally reveal itself.

There were never many reasons for trips like this when I was growing up. There was town for shopping. There was the beach when the weather was good enough for swimming and playing. There was Dangan, where we practised our strides and entertained vague ambitions of becoming Olympic sprinters. There was the Áras for badminton, and the Westside or Salthill pitches for camogie.

Moycullen was somewhere else. It belonged to matches and passing through.

Now we were walking into a chipper.

The Country Chip.

Everything suddenly seemed possible.

She ordered for all of us and we sat down.

Chips arrived.

Then fizzy orange.

I looked at the table and took it all in.

Chips were rare in our house. We did not have a deep-fat fryer. Fizzy drinks had their own place in the world, and that place was somewhere outside our kitchen. Later in the nineties, McCain would bring oven chips and microwave chips into our homes, and chips would become something we could make ourselves.

Even then, they retained something of the occasion.

She seemed perfectly happy. I watched her across the table.

By then, I had begun to understand that the man at the door was part of the story.

But she held the answers. So I watched.

I had been watching her across the table for a while.

There was something about the way she was eating her chips, perfectly happy with herself, that told me she knew something I didn’t.

I couldn’t leave it alone.

“Who was your man at the house?”

She looked at me.

Then she laughed.

“The dog warden.”

The dog warden. Sandy and JJ, our beloved springers, were living with us, full of life and noise and completely unaware of the administrative responsibilities that came with being a dog.

Their licences were somewhere between forgotten and nonexistent.

And suddenly the whole afternoon made sense.

She had seen the man at the door, understood exactly what was coming, made the calculation and simply kept going.

No hassle. No explanations. No stress.

Just the green Mini heading towards Moycullen.

A man at the front door could become an afternoon in Moycullen.

She had a way of doing that. Of slipping around the rules, finding the fun, and taking us with her.

I didn’t know then that this was a part of her I was only beginning to see.

She simply kept going.

I’m being targeted. Or maybe we are. Toby too.

It seems Reclaim Ireland, who I only discovered in the past few days, are on a big recruitment drive to Make Ireland Great Again, and I was very happy to see it arrive in my actual echo chamber because finally, finally, the Boomers and Facebook, or as they like to call it, THE FACEBOOK, are being called out for what happens when you spend enough time being led down those dark algorithmic holes where opinions arrive dressed as facts.

And we all see you. Clear as day.

The phonebook cover case worn in a multitude of colours. The heeled wedge runner. The body warmer, regardless of gender, which is apparently suitable outerwear for absolutely every occasion from going for a walk to attending a funeral. Smart casual, as smart as a Skechers runner with a cargo short, polo shirt and a formal black sock that was purchased for an event once and has since been promoted to daily wear.

The Irish man of a certain vintage, as my attention was drawn to yesterday by a formidable Mayo woman, also has a grip so strong on a plastic bag for life that I am beginning to think it is actually part of the outfit. Not the cloth one obviously, because we are not introducing anything that could possibly lead to questions about sexuality, but the plastic bag for life, clasped just below the handles with everything in it.

And it is never carried properly.

The handles are merely decorative.

The actual grip is underneath, as though the bag contains something of such national importance that losing it would bring the country to a standstill.

You will see him walking through town with the bag swinging gently at his side, completely committed to it, and inside there could be absolutely anything. A pair of swimming togs. A newspaper from Tuesday. A banana. A packet of biscuits. A jumper he has been carrying around since 2019. Some receipts. A bottle of water. And possibly another plastic bag, because you can never be too prepared.

It is one of those small Irish things that says more than it should.

And it is here, somewhere between the plastic bag for life and the formal black sock, that THE FACEBOOK becomes dangerous. Because misinformation spreads faster there than soft butter during a heatwave, even in my cold kitchen.

The opener is nearly always the same.

“Now, I am not racist, but...”

And then follows something that has apparently been passed down through three generations of WhatsApp groups, two lads at work and a man called Declan who “knows a fella in the council”.

So I always ask the same question. Where exactly did you hear this?

And the answer, with the confidence of someone presenting evidence to the Supreme Court, is:

“I saw it on Facebook.”

Ah.

THE FACEBOOK.

The source.

The oracle.

The great digital town square where your aunt can post a photograph of a sunset, your cousin can sell a sofa, someone can announce that they have “checked in” at Tesco and, underneath a photograph of a Pride flag, 335 people can collectively rediscover racism, misogyny and homophobia before lunchtime.

I deleted the Facebook app from my phone a long time ago, as I suspect most people under 45 did, although I still have it on my desktop because apparently I enjoy punishment.

It is now a place increasingly filled with absolute AI slop, conspiracy, recycled outrage and the same five opinions being served back to the same people until everyone is absolutely convinced they have independently arrived at a very original thought.

And then you see the comments.

My God, the comments.

You could post something on Instagram and Facebook at the same time and within five hours there will be hundreds of comments on Facebook full of absolute hatred towards anyone who is not white, not Irish, not heterosexual or, frankly, not sufficiently committed to looking exactly like the person commenting.

This was made painfully obvious here in Galway during Pride a couple of weekends ago. The comments became so vile that you simply could not leave them open.

And there is such a lack of originality to the hatred.

That is perhaps the strangest part.

It is rinse, wash, repeat.

The same phrases.

The same spelling.

The same outrage.

Their, there, they’re, your and you’re being thrown around with the confidence of people who believe punctuation is a woke conspiracy.

And then, because apparently there is always room for one more target, our new Mayor, Helen Ogbu, the first Black woman to hold the role in Galway, gets dragged into it for good measure.

She has become the consistent supporting character in the comments section. It barely seems to matter what the original post is about. Galway. Roads. Parking. Weather. A dog. A bin. A new café opening.

Helen.

Somehow Helen is there.

They are obsessed with her, with immigrants and with the gays and they are obsessed with who is allowed to be Irish.

And sometimes I genuinely wonder what they would talk about if they had to develop a personality or a point of view that was not built entirely around hating somebody.

We may never know.

Anyway, back to me and this sudden rise in Reclaim Ireland posts appearing in my feed.

Wow.

It is a bleak world out there.

And perhaps I am now being targeted because Toby is Black and I sometimes identify as a person of colour in the summer months when the lighting is favourable and I have been on holiday.

This is where I have to include myself in the joke, because the algorithm does not care whether you are racist or anti racist. It simply wants you to keep looking.

Give somebody something that confirms what they already think and they will stay.

Give somebody a person to blame and suddenly you have an audience.

We are now living inside increasingly separate information bubbles, with TikTok on one side and THE FACEBOOK on the other, and everyone is being fed a slightly different version of reality.

The problem is that fear, hate, misplaced outrage travels brilliantly and yet nuance, strangely enough, does not.

There is very little engagement to be had from a post saying, “Actually, there are quite a few complicated social and economic reasons why this is happening and perhaps we should look at the evidence.”

“THIS IS WHAT THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW” on the other hand, will have 2,000 comments before Maureen has finished her tea.

And this is where I think we need to talk about generational racism and bias in Ireland without pretending it belongs exclusively to one generation. Because there is a particular kind of prejudice that has been handed down, polished up and occasionally put on a Christmas jumper.

Some people grew up in an Ireland where certain conversations simply did not happen. Gay people were not openly gay. Ireland was overwhelmingly white. Immigration was a relatively small part of everyday life. You could go decades without having to examine some of the assumptions you had inherited because life rarely challenged them.

That world has changed. Ireland has changed. The people around us have changed.

And some of us have changed with it.

Others have discovered THE FACEBOOK.

That is the bit that worries me.

Because most people, whatever their age, whatever their skin colour, whatever country they came from or whoever they love, are actually looking for remarkably ordinary things. A safe place to live. A home. A job. People they love. A bit of security. A bit of fun. A holiday where nobody gets sunburnt. A decent cup of tea.

We are not fundamentally that complicated.

The moment you begin with the belief that another human being is worth less than you because of the colour of their skin, where they were born, who they love or what their religion is, you have already made the world considerably smaller for yourself.

And what a miserable way to live.

Imagine spending your one life being permanently furious about people you have never met. Imagine allowing an algorithm to introduce you to somebody and then immediately deciding you hate them. Imagine being so convinced that the world has been stolen from you that you never stop to ask whether perhaps the world simply changed.

Maybe the answer is not another post.

Maybe it is putting the phone down.

Maybe it is turning THE FACEBOOK off.

Maybe it is going outside.

Talk to somebody.

A real person.

Someone who does not look exactly like you. Someone whose life is completely different from yours. Ask them about it. Listen. You might* (will) discover they worry about exactly the same things you do.

And honestly, life is so much better when you are curious about people rather than frightened of them.

I know this because I am not wired for the other thing.

I like people, difference, finding out how other people live, like being wrong (not all the time!) I love learning something I did not know. It is a much more interesting way to spend a life.

So perhaps we should all try it.

I keep thinking about the phrase “I don’t mind”, partly because I hear it so often and partly because, the more I think about it, the more ridiculous it seems. “I don’t mind if women want to work.” “I don’t mind if two men want to get married.” “I don’t mind what people do with their own bodies.” Well, thank you. That is very generous of you. I wasn’t aware that the rest of us were waiting for the official notification that you had decided not to object.

There is something about the casualness of it that really gets me. It assumes, without even noticing the assumption, that other people’s lives are somehow open to your approval. That you have been appointed Minister for Other People’s Choices and, having considered the matter carefully, have decided that women may work, gay people may exist and other adults may make decisions about their own bodies. I am sure everyone will be relieved.

I think what is really bothering me is the sheer volume of this sort of thinking at the moment. Since the orange lump took office in the United States, the permission people seem to feel they have to say the quiet, ugly thing out loud has become extraordinary. Something has trickled down through public life and into ordinary conversation, and suddenly there seems to be less accountability, less social respect and far less curiosity about who other people actually are.

Everything feels louder. There is so much certainty and so little curiosity, and I find myself increasingly irritated by the lack of space to actually think about things. Before you have even finished explaining a point of view, somebody has decided which camp you belong in and is preparing their response. Layers of anger, outrage and hatred drown out the possibility of actually trying to understand what somebody is saying, where they have come from or what experiences might have shaped them.

I find the obsession with other people’s sexuality genuinely baffling. I cannot understand looking at two people who like each other, love each other or simply happen to be interested in each other and deciding that their sexuality is something you need to have an opinion about. They happen to be the same sex. So what? What exactly is the problem you are having here? I genuinely cannot get my head around it.

I feel the same way about racism. I cannot understand looking at somebody with brown or black skin and deciding that this tells you something about their value, their intelligence, their character or their place in society. It seems so obviously learned that I find it difficult to imagine anyone arriving at it independently. Nobody is born with a fully formed set of cultural prejudices. We absorb them. We inherit them. We hear them at home, at school, in the media, in jokes, in conversations and in the things people don’t even realise they are teaching us.

And I suspect that quite often people are expressing opinions they have never properly examined themselves. Ignorance can be surprisingly confident, particularly when it has been reinforced for years.

Which is why I keep coming back to empathy and curiosity.

Imagine It Was Your Life

I would genuinely urge people to spend more time trying to imagine what the world looks like from somebody else’s body and somebody else’s position in society. Not in the slightly worthy way we often talk about empathy, but properly. What would your experience of the world be if you had been born into a different family, with a different skin colour, a different gender, a different sexuality, a different economic background or a different set of opportunities?

How would you experience a room if you were used to being the person who was questioned rather than listened to? What would it feel like if decisions were constantly being made about your life by people who had never had to live it?

There are people who have had to develop an enormous awareness of other people simply because they have had to. They have learned to read rooms, understand power dynamics, anticipate how they will be perceived and think about how their actions might be interpreted. They have had to be curious about other people’s motivations because their own comfort or safety has sometimes depended on it.

And then there are people who have largely been allowed to just exist.

Historically, a lot of those people have been men, and particularly white men. This is not really controversial when you look at history. Men have occupied the majority of positions of power across politics, business, law, religion, education and culture, and they have overwhelmingly been the people deciding how those systems should work. They made the laws, established the institutions and defined many of the cultural norms that everyone else was expected to live within.

They have had a pretty good ride, if we are being honest.

If you have spent your life seeing people like you represented in positions of authority, making decisions and setting the rules, you may never have needed to develop the same level of curiosity about what the world looks like from somewhere else. You have been able to assume that your experience is simply the experience, rather than one particular experience.

That is changing, slowly, and I think a lot of the discomfort we are seeing comes from that shift.

Women are speaking more openly about power and inequality. People of colour are speaking about racism and cultural bias. LGBTQ+ people are speaking about their experiences. Groups of people who have historically been expected to fit themselves into systems that were never designed with them in mind are beginning to ask why the systems cannot change too.

And when people who have always had the loudest voice suddenly hear other voices coming through, it can feel to them as though everyone else has become louder.

Perhaps everyone else has simply started speaking.

We’ve Had a Good Run

I want to bring this closer to home because I do not have the hours required to unpack the American shit show, and I am sure we will return to it another day.

Here in Ireland, we have our own history to examine, particularly around women and care.

Our social and political systems were built around an extraordinarily specific idea of what a woman was supposed to do. She would stay at home, raise the children, look after her husband, care for ageing parents, help with his ageing parents, and somehow remain available for every aunt, uncle, neighbour and extended family emergency that appeared along the way.

Every element of care was essentially assumed to belong to her.

And the clever thing was that we gave it a compliment. Women are naturally more caring. Women are better at organising. Women just notice these things. Women are better with children. It sounds lovely until you realise that it is also a very effective way of making unpaid labour feel like a personality trait.

Then there was the other great social phenomenon, which I like to think of as male domestic incompetence. The strange inability to know where things are in your own house, to remember appointments that have been discussed repeatedly, to notice that there is no food in the fridge or to understand that somebody has to think about what the family will need next Tuesday.

The washing does not disappear because someone is naturally caring. The birthday present does not buy itself. The school appointment does not magically arrive in the calendar. Someone is thinking about all of it.

That thinking is work.

And yet we have built a society in which women are now expected to participate fully in education, employment, sport and public life while much of the old expectation around care has remained remarkably stubborn.

We have two people working outside the home and somehow the childcare system still seems to be based on the assumption that there is a woman somewhere who will absorb whatever does not fit neatly into the working day.

The pressures around having children are enormous. Housing, cost, fertility, work, childcare and changing relationships all play a role in declining birth rates across the world, and there is obviously no single explanation. But there is another enormous social change happening alongside all of this, which is that women finally have more agency to ask themselves whether they actually want the life they have traditionally been expected to have.

Do I want a partner?

Do I want children?

Do I want both?

Do I want neither?

Do I want to work?

Do I want to stay at home?

What sort of life do I actually want?

These are remarkably recent questions in the history of women.

And yet when the consequences of women having those choices become inconvenient for society, the weight of the problem somehow still finds its way back to the woman.

Pregnancy becomes a women’s issue. Abortion becomes a women’s issue. Childcare becomes a women’s issue. Fertility becomes a women’s issue. Falling birth rates become a women’s issue.

It is quite the trick.

Make Your World Bigger

I am a white woman (with a tan!) who has had enormous opportunities in life through education, sport and employment. I understand that I have been privileged, and I am grateful for that. I also think there is something useful in understanding that privilege without turning it into either guilt or a competition over who has suffered most.

For me, it means recognising that my experience is not the template for everybody else’s.

I would love more people, particularly men, to really think about that. Not simply to say they are supportive of women or that they don’t mind what women choose to do, but to actually become curious about why women have had to fight so hard for the freedom to make those choices in the first place.

And perhaps stop telling us what you don’t mind.

Nobody asked.

Last week I went to hear Donal Ryan at Kennys in Galway, and it was one of those evenings that reminded me why I love being around people who are interested in the world. He talked about always knowing he was a writer and told the story of writing his first short story because he was disappointed by the result of a boxing match, so he simply changed the ending and let his guy win. Fair enough.

He talked about his relationship with his father and, most beautifully, about his relationship with his wife, Annemarie. There was something about the tenderness with which he spoke about her that stayed with me.

The room was probably about 85% women, (Where are you men?) and the conversations afterwards were every bit as interesting as the event itself. I cycled home through Galway with my head full of thoughts, feeling that familiar sense that something in my understanding of the world had shifted slightly.

This is why I love going to things like that.

You listen to someone else’s experience.

You learn something you did not know.

You hear an idea from a perspective you might never have encountered otherwise.

You connect.

Then on Saturday in London I found myself surrounded by people from everywhere, and again I had that feeling of how lucky I am to genuinely enjoy meeting people whose lives have been lived in spaces that I have never occupied. The conversations, the laughing, the dancing, the openness, the general buzz of people being interested in each other rather than trying to establish who was right.

I came away feeling more connected to myself, which sounds slightly earnest but is actually true. Because when you are open and curious, your world gets bigger. You can walk into almost any room and find something to learn.

When you decide that somebody else is beneath you because of their skin colour, their sexuality, their gender or where they come from, your world gets smaller. When you decide that somebody else’s body, choices or existence require your approval, your world gets smaller again.

And I think that is what is bothering me most at the moment.

Not just the hatred itself, but the extraordinary lack of curiosity behind it.

The refusal to wonder.

The refusal to listen.

The certainty that your own experience is enough to explain everybody else’s.

Maybe that is what we need more of now. Not another argument. Not another person shouting louder. Not another opinion delivered with absolute certainty by someone who has never bothered to look outside their own experience.

Just a little more curiosity.

A little more empathy.

A willingness to imagine that the person sitting across from you has a completely different life from yours and that this does not make either of you less human.

And perhaps, the next time somebody says, “I don’t mind”, we can all pause for a moment and consider the extraordinary arrogance contained in those three words.

Because honestly, I don’t mind either.

Really.

Do you not?

Well, thank you.

Seeing as you don’t mind, we’ll get on with our lives now.

The heatwave has passed and another Galway International Arts Festival, alongside the Galway Film Fleadh, has taken its final bow. For a few extraordinary weeks each July, our small city becomes something else entirely. The streets hum with conversation, bicycles (mainly me + Tobers) weave between venues, friends become accidental companions, and culture slips so naturally into everyday life that it feels impossible to imagine Galway without it.

We are remarkably fortunate.

Few places in the world allow you to leave your front door on foot or by bike and spend an entire day moving between world class exhibitions, theatre, film, music and conversations with some of the finest minds working today. Everything is within reach. There is something wonderfully democratic about that. The arts are not hidden behind grand facades. They belong on our streets, in our galleries, our theatres and lecture halls, inviting anyone curious enough to walk through the door.

The Galway Film Fleadh began my annual pilgrimage. Every day became an impossible exercise in deciding what to miss rather than what to see. Documentary film has always held my heart. There is something profoundly moving about watching stories unfold that may soon travel the world, while you happened to catch them first in Galway.

One documentary on Gaza left me unable to speak. I walked out of Pálás, found a quiet windowsill and simply sat with what I had witnessed. Another took me to Ukraine’s front line. Outside, the sun blazed over Galway. Inside, we were travelling across continents in the dark, returning each time a little more informed and, perhaps, a little more compassionate.

Then came the Arts Festival, the fortnight I anticipate all year.

My own festival has always belonged to the exhibitions and, above all else, the Talks.

The exhibitions this year were exceptional. Awash by Ciarán MacChoncarraige transformed everyday street photography into something quietly poetic. Luke Reidy’s The Space Between, developed with Helena McElmeel Architects, was a masterclass in collaboration, where architecture became as important to the experience as the artwork itself. At Galway Arts Centre, John Rainey’s Deviations, curated by Tom McLean, rewarded slow looking. Assembly invited visitors into a thoughtful exploration of how architecture might encourage us to gather, listen and belong. The Festival Gallery, Printworks and the beautiful celebration of Gertrude Degenhardt at Kenny’s Bookshop all offered moments to pause.

If exhibitions encouraged reflection, the Talks demanded attention.

Every year my bicycle seemed to know the route instinctively. Up the canal towards the Bailey Allen Hall at the University of Galway, then back into town, then back again, often three or four times a day. It became a familiar rhythm.

There is nowhere I would rather spend an hour than in a room curated by Caitríona Crowe. Each summer she quietly assembles one of the finest programmes of public conversations anywhere.

Few people possess her rare combination of wit, intellect and generosity. She has an extraordinary ability to bring together some of the most thoughtful voices in the world while making every audience member feel personally welcome. These conversations have become one of my annual highlights.

Where else could you spend one afternoon considering friendship with Andrew O’Hagan and Brendan Kelly, return the next day to wrestle with artificial intelligence, hear Sally Hayden and Nick Maynard speak with heartbreaking honesty about Palestine and Lebanon, listen to Bel Trew describe reporting from the front lines, debate the future of America with Fintan O’Toole and Marion McKeone, then hearing Colm Tóibín and Iarla Ó Lionáird reflect on singing, memory and tradition?

These are not abstract discussions. They are opportunities to hear directly from people who have lived the stories we usually consume in headlines. They deepen our understanding in ways no article or social media post ever could. They leave us asking better questions of the world and of ourselves.

The remarkable thing is how accessible it all feels.

People arrive alone, with friends, after work, between meetings or on holiday. It makes no difference. By the end of every talk conversations have already begun. You leave discussing ideas with the person beside you, bump into neighbours you have not seen for months or continue debating what you have just heard over coffee on the walk back into town. The festival gives strangers a shared language, if only for an afternoon.

Outside, Galway was enjoying one of its finest summers in years. The streets were alive from morning until late at night. The Whale drifted through the city, delighting children and adults in equal measure. Audiences flowed towards the Big Top each evening. Gerry Mallon’s Laughter Loft at The King’s Head overflowed daily with audiences enjoying comedians preparing for Edinburgh. The Róisín Dubh seemed to have music pouring from every corner.

There was an unmistakable ease to life over those weeks. The usual question of “How’s the weather?” quietly disappeared, replaced instead with “Have you been to much of the festival?” or “What have you seen?” It is difficult to think of another event capable of changing the conversation of an entire city.

One of the most talked about productions was Brú Theatre’s Pádraicín, which transformed Galway itself into the stage. Audiences walked together through streets they thought they knew, discovering them anew through story, music and performance. It captured something essential about this festival. Art does not sit apart from the city. It lives within it.

This is not a complete review. I have deliberately left theatre and music largely untouched, not because they mattered less, but because this year I wanted to celebrate what I love most: the exhibitions that encourage us to slow down and the conversations that encourage us to think more deeply.

For two glorious weeks every summer, Galway becomes a city asking questions, sharing stories, walking a little more slowly and looking up a little more often.

And for that, Galway International Arts Festival, and especially Caitríona Crowe and the remarkable Talks programme, thank you.

The landline rang out. The coast was clear but for how long? A simple, innocent well intentioned ask, in the borrowing of a hoover. Even this held a potential threat of confrontation and a showing of a need that could be refused.

A quick drive up the road I had taken thousands of times, the once road home. Pulled in, coast was clear. The hoover was there, as it always was in the back place that I did not want to be in. This was never a place it got that much use. A look around that always stirred mixed emotions of a place I no longer knew and a place I no longer wanted to be. There was such a knowing here and yet a complete sense of loss.

As I packed the hoover into the car, the landline rang… instinctively I answered. The tone was concerned and warm, “Hello” and what had happened played out in simple terms. “I don’t want you to be upset.” There was nothing to be upset about, chaos and accidents were part of the course. Although she did not know that. Then followed the phone calls to inform those that would be impacted. Cliché responses of panic that held no weight either. The silence on the line with the repetition of circumstance and the complete avoidance of the fact that yet again, another near life miss played out.

“Very lucky” were the words said on the emergency room floor. “Did you know where she was going?” of course no one did. The question brushed off in a mirage of tuts and heavy breathing. Shame was there again and silence of more questions that would never even be asked let alone answered. The personal items were returned and mobile phone messages revealed the truth of the runaway act.

A formulaic and cold bedside vigil by people with no connection other than blood. The shhh and dismissal of facts of what had happened once revealed.

The car was totalled. Just the boot and driver seat remained intact. The skid marks and smashed in wall were the evidence that he had in fact happened. The popping of the boot revealed why. Who knew Irish Mist would be the culprit and the order of the day. Special offer Super Valu. 3 for 2.

As always, the action had nothing to do with them and became not even the main headline. Silence and then deflection to the grace of being ok. Another note for the medical file which now expanded to two folders. The secret trip to Cork was ruined, the why of going not to be mentioned and how dare you question me was the finish.

I drove the hoover to my house, used it with intention to then return it to the back room for it to sit there and never to be borrowed again.

If you never hear a word, can it ever become part of you? Children inherit more than eye colour and crooked smiles. They inherit vocabulary. Not the dictionary definition of words, but the ones spoken freely around the kitchen table. The ones offered without hesitation. The ones that never quite make it into conversation.

Every family has its own language and some homes are generous with praise.

I love you.
Well done.
I’m proud of you.
You look lovely today.

Others communicate affection differently.

Dinner on the table.
A lift to training.
A roof over your head.

Love exists, but it arrives without subtitles.

I often wonder which shapes us more: the words we hear repeatedly, or the ones we never hear at all? Much of who we become is built through repetition. The same phrases, the same reaction, the same assumptions. Long before we have the ability to question them, we are absorbing the vocabulary of the people around us.

Parents pass this language down, consciously or otherwise. But only for a while. Eventually, responsibility changes hands and we decide which words we carry forward and which ones stop with us.

Language has always fascinated me because it reveals so much without meaning to.

Consider kindness.

There was a time when kindness was something you practised. Now it has become something you can be. An identity. A personality trait. A line in an online biography.

Coffee.
Gym.
Kindness.
Obsessed.
It’s giving.

The internet has transformed parts of ourselves into carefully chosen labels. Words that are repeated so often they become detached from their original meaning. Kindness has become like enjoying coffee. Less an action, more a brand. Perhaps we learn less from the words people use to describe themselves than from the words they never think to mention.

Beauty is another word that interests me. It is everywhere. What a beautiful baby, weather, dress.

Sometimes the word is full of genuine feeling. Sometimes it is simply part of the script, a phrase inherited from every wedding speech that came before it. That is the strange thing about language. Words repeated often enough can lose their weight.

Words withheld can gain it. You can spend an entire childhood without hearing one particular word directed towards you and never realise it is missing.

How could you? You have no comparison.

Then, decades later, you hear it spoken easily. Casually. Almost carelessly. And suddenly you realise it belonged to a language you were never taught.

A wedding speech has its own rhythm. Gratitude. Laughter. Familiar stories softened by time. Then come the expected lines.

Doesn’t she look beautiful? Most people hear a standard compliment. Occasionally, someone hears something else. Not because the word itself is remarkable, but because it has never belonged to that voice before.

An ordinary adjective, spoken without thought, can carry the weight of something you waited years to understand you were waiting for.

It raises a question.

How much power belongs to a word, and how much belongs to its absence?

I once heard a woman ask a question that has stayed with me longer than any compliment ever has.

“Why should anyone else’s opinion of your appearance carry any weight?”

It sounds simple.

But if someone thinks you are beautiful, what has actually changed?

And if they do not, what has actually changed?

Nothing, except the importance you have decided to give their judgement.

For generations, women have lived beneath a quiet system of grading.

Pretty.

Plain.

Attractive.

Not quite.

As though existing in the world requires constant assessment against someone else’s ruler.

Freedom begins when praise no longer elevates you and criticism no longer diminishes you. When both become what they always were: opinions.

Passing through.

I also wonder how early these vocabularies become gendered. Little girls are often beautiful before they are brave.

Pretty before they are powerful.

Sweet before they are strong.

Little boys are increasingly being allowed to be beautiful too, and that is progress. But perhaps we could borrow a little more from each other’s dictionaries.

Tell girls they are courageous.

Tell them they are capable.

Tell them they are funny.

Tell them they are resilient.

Tell boys they are gentle.

Tell them they are beautiful.

Perhaps the greatest gift we can give a child is not confidence itself, but a richer language from which confidence can grow. Because words matter. They sit quietly inside us, sometimes for decades, before revealing the shape they have made.

And sometimes the greatest freedom comes from deciding which of those words deserve to keep their weight.

Perhaps the words we spend our lives searching for were never lost at all. They simply belonged to someone else’s vocabulary. The privilege of growing older is deciding which words finally become our own.

Songs stay.

Not in the way people think they do. Not just as memories of nights out, first loves or moments of happiness. Sometimes a song can hold an entire version of a person. A house. A time that nobody speaks about anymore.

Years later, a few seconds of a melody can bring everything back.

The red Mitsubishi Lancer. The cassette tape. The same song playing again and again as the car moved around the roads near home. Not a journey anywhere in particular, just driving. Hours spent inside that car with music filling the space.

Elton John’s Candle in the Wind was everywhere.

Released in 1997, after the death of Princess Diana, it sat alongside Something About the Way You Look Tonight as a double A-side. The tape was supposed to be shared between the two songs, but somehow Candle in the Wind always won. Every few plays, if lucky, the other song might appear. Mostly it was that familiar opening, that build, that feeling of knowing exactly what was coming next.

The music was constant. It filled the silence. It covered the miles. It sat alongside everything.

Christmas had a different soundtrack. Christmas meant Enya.

The same CD playing over and over again from a built-in CD player that felt incredibly modern at the time. It had been won years before at a golf competition and was treated like a prize. Radio, cassette and CD all together. A sign of changing times.

The song was China Roses.

The music itself was beautiful. Calm. Atmospheric. Almost peaceful.

But that was not what it meant in that house.

In that house, Enya meant chaos.

It was the soundtrack to frantic energy. To footsteps moving quickly through hallways. To cupboards opening and closing. To pots being slammed down. To a kitchen full of food that never quite made sense. Meals that were rushed, forgotten or overdone. Food prepared without anyone really sitting down to eat it.

There was a strange feeling of absence even when everyone was there.

Conversations non existent. Familiarity disappeared. The person in front of you could feel like someone else entirely.

There were gifts with the wrong names written on them. Moments that were confusing rather than joyful. The disappearing act that everyone recognised but nobody named. A retreat to the shed. The running of a bath. The quiet after the noise.

And all the while, Enya played.

That is the strange thing about music. It does not know what it is accompanying.

A song can be written about beauty and become attached to sadness. A song can bring comfort to one person and anxiety to another. The notes stay the same. The memories change.

Then came Sean Keane.

I’m No Stranger to the Rain.

Different song. Different feeling. Different kind of memory.

It arrived later in the day, often after everything else had already happened. Hours of it playing. Again and again.

That voice still does something now. The tone. The pitch. The first few seconds.

Goosebumps.

Then unease.

Not because of the song itself, but because of everything that existed around it.

Music has a way of storing things that people cannot.

It remembers the ordinary days and the difficult ones. The laughter and the fear. The moments that looked normal from the outside but felt completely different from within.

For children who grow up around chaos, songs become timestamps. They mark where they were, what was happening and who was in the room. And sometimes, years later, all it takes is one line, one note, one voice, and they are back there again.

My father sang it badly on the platform at Ceannt Station one Sunday evening while we waited for the train from Dublin. My mother was on it, returning from the Women’s Mini Marathon. I had spent the day counting down the hours until she came home.

“You say goodbye, and I say hello.”

“Did you write that yourself?” I asked.

“Of course.”

He smiled just enough for me to believe him.

Years later, hearing The Beatles on the radio, I realised I had been had. It felt less like a lie than a gift. The sort only passed between people who trust each other enough to know the truth can wait.

The train pulled in.

People drifted past carrying bags and tired faces. I was searching for my mother when I noticed that he had stopped singing. He had frozen.

An older man approached. His clothes hung awkwardly from him. Life seemed to have worn away at the edges.

“Hello, Tony.”

Silence.

The man walked on. So did we.

I had never seen a greeting unanswered. No “How are you?” No handshake. Just an emptiness that seemed to linger after the man had disappeared into the crowd.

We found an empty bench.

“Who was that?”

My father looked away.

“A total bollix.”

His eyes had filled before the words came. For a moment I wasn’t looking at the man I knew. I was looking at a twelve-year-old boy.

“What happened?”

It was 1962. Boarding school in Sligo. A boy from Roscommon, away from home for the first time. He made the senior football team in his first year. Not everyone thought he should have. There were no phone calls home. No one asking how you were settling in. The older boys had their own way of expressing disappointment. Food was scarce. The dormitories were cold. You learned quickly that showing pain invited more of it.

He spoke without drama. Just facts. As though the years between then and now had not softened them.

I had always thought resilience was simply part of who he was. Sitting beside him on that bench, I began to wonder if resilience was just another word for surviving long enough that nobody asked how it began.

Then my mother appeared, stepping down from the last carriage. He stood. “Well,” he said, “How did you get on?” The moment was gone.

We walked towards the car as they spoke about Dublin, the crowds and the race. I never asked whether my mother knew that story. I never asked if he had told anyone else.

Perhaps I heard it only because of chance. Because a Beatles song was sung out of tune on the Platform at Ceannt Station. Because one man said hello. Because another could not.

Forty years had passed. It had taken only a single word to make him twelve again.

There are certain guarantees in life, death and taxes. And if you write about women’s healthcare for long enough, someone will eventually tell you they’re praying for you.

There is a familiar rhythm to writing about women. You raise a question and someone tells you to refrain. Someone says they’ll pray for you and someone accuses you of being vile.

Repeat.

Following my recent pieces, I’ve received plenty of messages. Most have been thoughtful. Some have disagreed respectfully. A few have arrived privately. One arrived anonymously through my letterbox.

None of that surprised me. The language rarely changes.

Apparently, I am vile. Disgusting. A propagandist. Murder appeared so often I wondered if there was a bulk discount on the word. I was instructed to refrain from expressing my views. I was assured prayers would be said on my behalf.

One line particularly caught my attention. According to the letter, babies are not conceived by two people. They are “formed by the Lord”. Biology has had a difficult week. The letter finished with “God bless Peter Roche TD.”

I suspect it was written by a woman. There was something wonderfully committed about it. Proper pen and paper. Beautiful handwriting. Anonymous, of course, but you have to admire the dedication to stationery.

The irony wasn’t lost on me.

On the same week I received anonymous outrage, I also received a private message from a woman who had written directly to Peter Roche. Her message began exactly as countless women’s messages begin.

“Sorry to message privately...”

Sorry.

Before she’d even told me her story, she apologised. Women apologise before speaking about their own experiences.

The people telling them to be quiet rarely do.

She explained that she had written to her elected representative after discovering that her much wanted baby had fatal foetal abnormalities. Because of the legislation, she had to travel to Britain for a termination for medical reasons.

She wasn’t looking for sympathy.

She wasn’t looking for an argument.

She simply wanted her TD to understand what the legislation had actually meant for someone living with its consequences.

His response?

Nothing.

No acknowledgement. No reply.

Just silence.

At around the same time, Peter Roche was publicly discussing emails and conversations from people who wanted the mandatory three day waiting period to remain.

Read those two facts again.

A woman writes after losing the future she thought she was going to have. She explains, quietly and respectfully, what Irish legislation meant for her family.

Nothing.

Others write asking that the waiting period remain. Those voices are acknowledged publicly. This isn’t really about abortion. It’s about credibility. It’s about who Ireland chooses to believe when women tell us what happened to them.

Because this pattern exists far beyond abortion.

Women explain pain, discrimination, healthcare, harassment and systems that don’t work. Then someone who has never lived those experiences arrives to explain women back to themselves. Usually from a position of complete moral certainty. That certainty fascinates me.

Nobody sends anonymous letters condemning campaigners for better bowel cancer treatment. Nobody tells people advocating for improved cardiac care that they’re disgusting. Nobody promises to pray for someone asking for better prostate services.

Yet women’s healthcare has become one of the only areas where complete strangers feel entitled to claim moral authority over another person’s medical treatment.

When you stop and think about it, that is extraordinary. Then there’s my new favourite word.

Refrain.

I’ve heard it a lot recently.

Refrain from expressing your views.

Refrain from questioning legislation.

Refrain from asking why women travel.

Refrain from asking why constituents received no reply.

Refrain from making anyone uncomfortable.

It’s a wonderful word. Polite, respectable, almost gentle.

It asks nothing more of women than silence.

But history has never been changed by women who refrained.

If women had refrained, we’d still accept that severe pain during childbirth was simply something to endure rather than something medicine should address.

If women had refrained, contraception would still be beyond reach for countless women.

If women had refrained, marital rape would still be dismissed.

If women had refrained, the Eighth Amendment would never have been repealed.

Progress has always begun with women refusing to be quiet.

Perhaps that’s why the word keeps appearing. Because asking women to refrain has always been easier than listening to what they’re actually saying.

The anonymous letter writer told me they would pray for me. I appreciate the sentiment. I only wish the same energy had been directed towards the women quietly writing to their elected representatives, hoping someone might read their words with compassion instead of ideology.

They tell women to refrain with one hand while asking them to trust the system with the other.

The difficulty is that many women have. And when they needed that system most, it didn’t write back.

Peter Roche is back, this time with more alleged lines of communication from women across the country. Yesterday it was stories and phone calls. Today it is “dozens and dozens” of letters. At this stage, I am half expecting carrier pigeons to arrive with accounts of near abortions and moral dilemmas entrusted specifically to Peter.

In an article today in the Irish Independent, Peter Roche remarked:

“Most people that find themselves in that situation will make an informed decision. This is a massive ordeal in a person’s life. I’m reminded of scenarios where a couple’s relationship breaks down and the girl might decide to rush and terminate the pregnancy against the wishes of the boyfriend. I think that three day would allow for time to consider whether to make that decision.”

Mr Roche said that in the lead-up to the votes his office received “dozens and dozens” of letters imploring him to vote against the motion. “I had my mind made up long before this” he said.

He continued: “I’m undeniably disappointed with the way things went last night. I think its undoing what the general public voted for in 2019 and we have an obligation to speak out about these things that have life changing consequences.”

What stands out again is the language. Roche speaks of a relationship breaking down and “the girl” rushing to terminate a pregnancy against the wishes of “the boyfriend”.

Not her boyfriend. The boyfriend.

The grammar is revealing. The woman is reduced to “the girl”, while the man is elevated into a position whose wishes must apparently be weighed and considered. It presents a scenario where women act impulsively and emotionally after a breakup, making life-changing healthcare decisions as a reaction to relationship difficulties. It is patronising, insulting and entirely unsupported by evidence.

Women do not “rush” into abortions because a relationship ends. Anyone who has spent even five minutes listening to women speak honestly about pregnancy decisions knows that these are complex, difficult and deeply considered circumstances.

It is also worth remembering that the people did not vote to retain a three day waiting period. They voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment. The mandatory waiting period was a political compromise inserted afterwards. It was not the expressed will of the electorate. Invoking it now as though it carries some special democratic mandate is simply rewriting history.

Link to how every single TD voted

One of the strangest things about being a woman is the endless discussion about us. Our bodies. Our choices. Our morality. Our responsibilities. Our reproductive systems. There are entire industries, institutions, governments and religious organisations dedicated to discussing women, regulating women, questioning women and mistrusting women.

Very few seem interested in simply listening to us.

The latest example came this week during discussions around removing Ireland’s mandatory three day waiting period for abortion services. As always, the bishops had thoughts. The Catholic Bishops of Ireland urged what they called a “Covid-style response” to abortion. The irony is almost too much to process.

How these men continue to enjoy a platform from which to lecture women and society about morality, children and family life remains one of the great mysteries of modern Ireland.

This is, after all, the same institution that oversaw generations of systemic sexual abuse, cruelty, cover ups, Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes and the industrial scale mistreatment of women and children. Yet somehow they continue to position themselves as moral authorities on what women should do with their bodies. It would be funny if it wasn’t so exhausting.

The conversation itself is revealing. One of the arguments repeatedly made in favour of retaining the three day waiting period is that women need time to think.

Time to consider and reflect. As though pregnancy begins when a woman enters a doctor’s surgery. As though she arrives at an appointment completely unaware of what is happening. As though a doctor says, “Congratulations, you’re pregnant”, and she immediately shouts, “Excellent, let’s schedule an abortion.”

Women know they are pregnant before they arrive. They have sat with the reality. They have thought about it while brushing their teeth, while lying awake at 3am, while making dinner, while collecting children from school, while trying to work and function and breathe. The idea that women require a state mandated three day pause in order to appreciate the seriousness of the decision is deeply insulting.

As Sarah Clancy perfectly observed: “Being pregnant does not start in the doctor’s surgery. Women will have known they are pregnant since they did the test, not since they walked in the door of the doctor’s surgery.”

Exactly. The three days are not about reflection. They are about oversight. They are about inserting the state into a decision that already belongs to the woman. They are about mistrust.

Because underneath all of these conversations sits the same assumption that has followed women for centuries. That women cannot quite be trusted.

Not fully or completely and not with our own bodies or our own futures. And definitely not with our own decisions. The irony is that no group of people on earth spends more time thinking about the consequences of pregnancy than women.

Pregnancy does not happen to men. The act that creates it may involve two people, but the consequences immediately become the responsibility of one. The physical, emotional, social, financial and professional consequences. Women carry all of it.

Men can and often do simply walk away. Society rarely seems particularly bothered by that reality. Even culturally we joke about it. How many times have we heard a man asked how many children he has? “Two that I know of.” Cue laughter. The joke works because everyone understands the implication. Now imagine a woman making the same joke. I’ve started using it myself. The silence that follows is magnificent.

Every man I’ve said it to appears to be running a software update in real time. Keep up, Trevor. It’s a joke. Smile more. Calm down. You’re getting hysterical.

And speaking of hypocrisy, Fine Gael TD Peter Roche explained that he opposed removing the waiting period because of the number of women who had told him that they supposedly changed their minds during those three days.

Really, Peter? Women are still fighting to be able to discuss periods openly without embarrassment. Women routinely report difficulties discussing reproductive health even within families. Yet we are apparently expected to believe that significant numbers of women are confiding in politicians about becoming pregnant, considering abortion and then changing their minds because of a mandatory waiting period.

That is certainly one version of events.

What is remarkable is how often discussions about women’s healthcare become discussions about everyone except women.

The state.

The church.

Political parties.

Campaign groups.

Male politicians.

Male commentators.

Male moral philosophers.

Everyone gets a microphone.

Women get a waiting period.

The vote itself was revealing.

The National Women’s Council welcomed the removal of the waiting period, highlighting the practical barriers it creates, particularly for vulnerable and marginalised women who may struggle to attend multiple appointments.

Yet a majority of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael TDs voted against its removal.

Even now, eight years after the referendum, there remains a deep discomfort among parts of Irish political life with the idea that women might simply be trusted.

Several elected Reform UK representatives and candidates have expressed views on abortion and women’s rights that seem permanently rooted in the belief that women cannot be trusted to make decisions without supervision.

The underlying message remains remarkably consistent.

Women are irrational, irresponsible, morally suspect, require guidance, require oversight, require permission. And all of it is wrapped up in a comforting narrative about protecting us. Protecting women from ourselves. Protecting us from making the wrong choices. Protecting us from our own autonomy. The truth is much simpler.

No woman takes the decision to have an abortion lightly. Not one.

The people who suggest otherwise reveal more about their own prejudices than they do about women.

Because while politicians, bishops and commentators spend their time debating women’s lives, the women concerned have already done the thinking.

Probably for far longer than three days, more seriously than any parliamentary debate and with more honesty than any bishop’s statement.

The question has never been whether women are capable of making these decisions.

The question is why so many people remain uncomfortable with the fact that they can.

After a morning of listening to analysis on social media bans, I felt compelled to write. The damage is visible, the data is in, the public knows it. So why are governments still pretending this is up for debate?

Social media is about 20 years old. The smartphone has fundamentally altered how society functions. Personally, professionally, economically and politically. We handed over our attention, our time and, in many ways, our minds in exchange for convenience, connection and the occasional dopamine hit from a stranger liking a photograph of our dinner.

Twenty years in, we are only now beginning to ask whether this was a spectacularly bad trade.

The evidence is hardly hidden. Most people know exactly how they feel after forty-five minutes of scrolling. Tired. Irritable. Distracted. Slightly annoyed at people they have never met. Yet somehow we continue to pick up the phone again five minutes later.

It is perhaps the most successful addiction ever created. One that arrives in your pocket, charges overnight and sends you helpful reminders to come back.

The impact on young people is becoming impossible to ignore. Rising anxiety. Reduced attention spans. Constant comparison. Endless exposure to content designed not to educate or inform, but to keep eyes glued to screens for as long as possible.

Yet governments move at the pace of a man reading the instructions after assembling the wardrobe. Australia has acted. The UK is moving. Ireland, naturally, is discussing it.

We will establish a task force to examine the issue. The task force will commission a report to investigate findings that have already been investigated. A consultancy firm will be paid several million euro to tell us what everyone already knows. Then there will be recommendations. Then consultations on the recommendations. Then perhaps a tribunal into why nothing happened after the recommendations.

Ireland has a long and proud tradition of talking about problems until they become historical artefacts.

The usual defence of social media is that it can be educational. Of course it can. So can a library. But let’s stop pretending teenagers are spending eleven hours a day researching the migratory habits of birds or the history of oak trees. They are sharing selfies, chasing validation and doom scrolling through algorithms that know them better than they know themselves.

Some of the very people who built these platforms have openly limited or banned their own children’s access to them. That should tell us something. Yesterday I watched a news report featuring a 13 year old upset at the prospect of social media restrictions. He said he didn’t know what he would do without it.

His screen time was eleven hours a day.

If a teenager said they spent eleven hours a day doing almost anything else, alarm bells would ring immediately. The strangest part of all this is how normal it has become.

People cannot walk down a street without watching videos. They cannot sit in silence for two minutes without reaching for a screen. The average person checks their phone dozens, sometimes hundreds, of times a day.

Someone once compared checking email to walking to your letterbox. Imagine physically getting up and walking to your front gate twenty-five times an hour just to see if a letter had arrived.

You would recognise the behaviour instantly. Yet when it involves a phone, we call it productivity.

There is an ambient anger hanging over society at the moment. A constant low-level irritation. Everyone seems exhausted. Everyone feels behind. Everyone is consuming more information than any human brain was designed to process.

Social media did not create all of that. But it has become the biggest thief of our time, attention and energy. The real question is why institutions always seem to require twenty years of evidence before acting on what ordinary people figured out in about twenty minutes.

I read this line in The Sunday Times Style yesterday “Someone who has good taste is not someone with the right bag, the right shoes, or the right shade of paint on the wall.” Good taste is the ability to resist the quiet pressure to constantly update yourself. It is knowing what actually makes you feel calm, what gives you joy, and what simply makes life feel a bit easier. And then actually choosing it.

How often do we ask ourselves those questions properly? Not in passing, not while scrolling, but in a way that allows us to sit with the answer long enough for it to matter.

We live in a time of mass exposure to one another, and a globally uniform style sheet on how to dress, how to live, and what your home should look like. There is a curated aesthetic for every activity. Even experience now comes with its own vocabulary, often reduced to flattened words like “wholesome”, which can end up meaning whatever the algorithm fed you this week.

I go on about social media a lot, because every day another layer is added to the strange collective script we are all somehow reading from. It is almost comical, except it is also a bit exhausting. There is now a tone people slip into, a way of speaking that makes everyday things sound profound, as if they have discovered a new philosophy in a morning coffee reel.

I saw a fashion roundup recently for the must haves of summer 2026. One item was described as something she “simply could not function without”, referring to a pair of Adidas shorts she had owned for a week. She was “obsessed”, apparently. There is this constant swing between love and hate, everything exaggerated into something urgent, essential, life defining. It starts online, then quietly slips into how people actually talk.

Mar shampla…. for example as gaeilge

First world problems, I know. But we live in the first world, so that is the only reality we are actually operating in.

We are “making core memories”, as opposed to, I suppose, regular memories. My heart is full. Everything is either life changing or meaningless. There is very little in between.

Even language has started to feel borrowed. Cars are “she”. Sandwiches are “she”. Gym becomes “gym girly”. There is a softness to it, but also a uniformity. A shared script that flattens difference into something easily consumable.

Meanwhile, “not all men” has become almost a parody of itself, usually followed by the same predictable pattern of deflection. It has stopped feeling like a conversation and started feeling like a reflex.

Language is not neutral. And now that so much of life is lived on screens, it often feels like we are all participating in a kind of global imitation of experience. Small villages of style and opinion, all echoing each other across cities and countries.

The desire to look the same, to belong to a recognisable aesthetic tribe, has made personal style feel like something from another era. Fast fashion has not just made clothing cheaper, it has made individuality harder to spot. Millions of people wearing variations of the same thing, all told it is a choice.

Consumerism is clever like that. It convinces each person they are making an independent decision, when in reality they are just selecting from the same rotating set of options. Depending on which “pack” you belong to, you wear the uniform without even noticing it.

Anyway, the reason I am writing this is because I have had a bit of feedback lately on small things that genuinely make life feel calmer and more grounded.

Travel lighter. A carry on only bag. Three women, including my sister who is currently en route to New York, have all embraced it. It forces you to think differently. What do you actually need, and what are you carrying just in case you become a different version of yourself on holiday.

Read a book instead of scrolling. We already know that 45 minutes scrolling can leave you feeling slightly worse, slightly scattered, slightly drained. Forty five minutes of reading does the opposite. Even two or three chapters changes the pace of your thinking. It brings words back into your life. And sometimes you pick up a new one. Lately mine has been “gauche”. I am enjoying using it far too much.

Go outside. Move your body or just walk with no real purpose. The simplicity of this advice is probably why it gets ignored. But twenty minutes outside, away from everything demanding your attention, genuinely changes how you feel. I will not pretend there is a precise statistic for this, but you do not really need one.

The data, in this case, is you.

Come back to yourself a little more often. Stop buying into every trend as if it is instruction. Clothes, bags, shoes, whatever it is, pause before you decide you need it to exist properly in the world. Think about comfort. Think about expression. Think about what actually feels like you.

I always admire people who do their own thing. Most of us do, even if we do not always act on it.

I got my runners resoled last week. I loved them too much to let them go. Edmund to the rescue. Look at the soles now, ready for another round. It is a small thing, but maybe that is the point.

I also bought a book on Friday in Charlie Byrnes called Other People’s Lives by Kathleen McMahon. I am almost finished it. It is brilliant writing. I picked it up from a recommendation in a Dublin Book Festival newsletter I subscribe to.

And maybe that is the quiet conclusion here. Not everything needs to be optimised, curated, or consumed at speed. Some things just need to be read, worn in, or walked through slowly enough that they actually stay with you.

There is a strange contradiction at the heart of modern society. Many men still seem deeply attached to the idea that they should be in charge. Yet increasing numbers cannot manage basic adulthood without applause. They want leadership status while outsourcing emotional labour, household management, social planning, childcare and often their own personal administration.

For centuries, men built entire political, legal and religious systems around the idea that women were irrational, emotional creatures incapable of making important decisions. Meanwhile women were quietly raising children, running households, holding communities together and surviving laws written specifically to limit their freedom.

The irony would be funny if it were not so exhausting. Women were not given rights. Men withheld them. Women fought for them. Every right women possess today exists because women demanded it, marched for it, worked for it, were imprisoned for it and in some cases died for it.

Yet somehow we are still having the same conversations. In 1951, Dr Noel Browne attempted to introduce free healthcare for mothers and children in Ireland. He was destroyed politically for it.

The Catholic hierarchy led by my arch nemesis of course the archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid and medical establishment united to ensure women remained under control, under supervision and under judgement.

The message was simple. Women could produce children. Women could sacrifice themselves. Women could obey. But women could not be trusted with autonomy.

Seventy-five years later, women are still being debated. Still being regulated. Still being discussed as though they are a public policy problem requiring management. There has never been an equivalent national obsession with controlling men’s bodies. Funny, that. The institutions may have changed but the assumptions remain remarkably familiar.

Women know their own minds until they disagree.

Women are capable until they ask for equality.

Women are believed until they report violence.

If a woman reports abuse, she is lying. If she stays silent, she is complicit. If she speaks too loudly, she is hysterical. If she speaks calmly, it could not have been that serious. Apparently women are engaged in an elaborate national hobby of inventing sexual assaults for attention.

Because obviously being called a liar, a slut and a troublemaker sounds like a fantastic way to spend an afternoon. Meanwhile there is a question I ask repeatedly.

Would I do that?

Would any woman I know do that?

Would we grope a statue in public?

Would we slap it?

Would we choke it?

Would we shout sexual comments at strangers?

Would we follow someone down a street after rejection?

Would we send unsolicited photographs of our genitals to people?

The answer is no. Every single time.

Yet whenever violence against women is discussed, men rush to explain that they personally would never behave that way.

Perhaps. But ask them about their friends. Their brothers. Their fathers. The certainty starts to wobble. Ask whether they would leave a vulnerable woman with every man they know. Ask whether they would trust every male friend with their daughter.

The answers become considerably more complicated. And that is the conversation we never seem willing to have. Instead we get endless performances of concern.

Protect women. Defend women. Save women.

Usually delivered by men who seem oddly uninterested in listening to women. The modern obsession with “protecting women” has become almost parody.

Far-right politicians suddenly discover feminism whenever they want to attack immigrants. Men who have spent years dismissing women’s concerns suddenly become passionate defenders of female safety when there is an opportunity to direct hatred towards someone with a different accent or skin colour.

The concern lasts approximately three minutes. Right up until a woman starts talking about domestic violence. Or reproductive healthcare. Or equal pay. Or sexual harassment. Or misogyny. Then the concern mysteriously evaporates.

Protection has conditions. The woman must be attractive. She must be agreeable. She must not be angry. She must not challenge power. She must remain grateful.

The rules are simple.

If a woman says no, she is cold. If a woman says yes, she is easy.

If she stays silent, it is her fault. And if she complains about any of this, she has no sense of humour.

Language plays a role in all of this.

Culture is carried through words. The words we choose matter because they shape what we accept.

Think about the language surrounding sex. Words of aggression and domination that transform intimacy into impact. Human beings into objects and then violence into entertainment. Then we wonder why so many people struggle to distinguish between desire and entitlement.?

Language normalises, excuses, teaches and reveals. Perhaps that is why the language surrounding men remains so generous.

A father changes a nappy and he is extraordinary. A husband washes a dish and he is husband of the year. A man treats women with basic dignity and he is apparently a rare treasure. The bar is now so low that if a man does not send an unsolicited dick pic he is considered relationship material.

Women, meanwhile, are expected to perform miracles without recognition. The standards remain breathtakingly unequal. The truth is that women do not need more protection.

Women need more allies from men willing to challenge other men. More men willing to interrupt misogyny rather than laugh nervously at it. More men willing to stop treating decency as a favour they perform for women. Because it is not women’s responsibility to solve male violence. Women have spent generations explaining the problem. Writing about it, researching, campaigning, marching and surviving it.

The question is no longer whether women care. The question is whether enough men do. And if the answer is no, perhaps the issue is not that women have failed to explain it properly. Perhaps the issue is that too many men have spent centuries believing leadership was their birthright while refusing to do the work required to deserve it.

Not all men. But certainly enough. Enough that thirty women have been killed in Northern Ireland since 2020. Enough that girls grow up expecting harassment as a routine part of public life. Enough that violence against women is treated as inevitable rather than intolerable.

What exactly are men waiting for? Because women are not dying from a lack of awareness. Women are dying because too many men still view violence against women as someone else’s problem. Until that changes, every statement, every campaign and every social media post about protecting women is just theatre.

Women do not need protecting. Women need men to stop producing the danger in the first place.

The lifelong battle of the female body begins long before womanhood. It has been reported that it starts as young as five, maybe younger, with the sudden awareness that your body has a presence in the world and that this presence is being assessed. Measured. Commented on. Ranked.

Too tall. Too small. Too fat. Too skinny. Too muscular. Too soft. Too much.

And that is before we even get into personality, where women are also somehow permanently wrong. Too loud. Too quiet. Too ambitious. Not ambitious enough. She has let herself go. She tries too hard. She looks great for her age. For her age being one of the most backhanded compliments ever invented. She is ageing badly. She has had work done. She needs work done. She has notions. She has the life.

Honestly, there is simply no correct way to be a woman in this world. Which is why I would like to formally ask society to back off women’s bodies once and for all.

Not because we are fragile. Quite the opposite. Because women are already carrying around the loudest, harshest and most relentless internal dialogue imaginable about our own bodies anyway. There is no need for external commentary. We have it covered.

The irony in all of this is almost beyond parody. Women’s bodies have been public debate topics since the dawn of time and yet women’s health itself has barely been researched properly. We know more about how women should look than how women actually function.

There are entire industries dedicated to flattening our stomachs, lifting our faces, shrinking our thighs and removing evidence that we have ever lived at all, but when it comes to understanding female hormones, reproductive health and the monthly psychological warfare many women experience, suddenly everyone goes quiet.

Or better still, they test things on small boys and then apply the findings to women because apparently our physiology is close enough. Grand. Brilliant system altogether.

I have been thinking about bodies this week because Ireland is in the middle of what can only be described as a three-day Mediterranean identity crisis. It is 27 degrees and the entire country is rejoicing (after that brutal winter..) . There are men walking around topless with scorched red faces and cargo shorts. Put it away love. Wrap it up!

The weather chat has escalated as it always does. “God isn’t it fabulous.” “You’d be nowhere else.” Followed quickly by the national emotional comedown of “Ah but it’s breaking Thursday.”

But warm weather does bring something else with it for women. Pressure.

Pressure to remove the layers (and level down or remove entirely the denier on those trusty tights). Pressure to suddenly possess a “body” in a country where summer itself cannot commit to showing up. Pressure to figure out dresses, shorts, skirts and bare skin after nine months of tactical knitwear and survival layering.

Being in your body in heat feels different too. Swollen somehow. Similar to the particular puffiness that arrives after four glasses of white wine once you pass thirty, where it settles beautifully into your face, hips and lower belly.

Bodies are funny things. We rarely value them until they let us down. Then suddenly we swear eternal devotion to them. We promise nourishment, movement, sleep, gratitude. We vow never to take them for granted again.

Until next Tuesday.

I have lived a hundred lives inside my own body. I have absolutely detested it. I have tolerated it. Occasionally I have even liked it.

I have always been tall, which means the world has always felt entitled to inform me of this fact as though I myself had somehow missed it. Mainly men, interestingly enough. Men who announce “God you’re tall” with the confidence of someone delivering urgent breaking news.

Like so many women, my relationship with my body has been complicated. I had a phase of very controlled not-eating before my Leaving Cert (I even gawk thinking of Muller light yoghurts and Avonmore light soup today). Then I gained weight in college. Then came travelling in my twenties where I was essentially a permanently swollen woman surviving on adrenaline, alcholol and irregular sleep.

For the past decade I have actually been more or less the same size and shape consistently, and yet I still wake up some mornings convinced none of my clothes will fit me anymore. So many women experience this strange body neurosis. The irrational panic that overnight your body has betrayed you somehow.

Over 85% of women reportedly have some form of distorted relationship with their body image, which makes me think there must have been a class the rest of us attended without realising where we all collectively learned to distrust our reflections.

What we know now, finally, is how deeply hormones affect every aspect of our lives. But after the initial teenage briefing of “don’t get pregnant” and a vague conversation about periods, most of us were sent out into the world completely unequipped to understand what was actually happening inside our bodies month to month.

No one explained follicular phases. Ovulation. Luteal phases. The impact on mood, energy, appetite, sleep, anxiety, self-image and emotional regulation. If women were armed with proper information about their own hormonal cycles, we could probably organise our lives far better and with a lot more self-compassion.

Instead many of us spend years believing we are simply failing at being people once a month.

Last month my luteal phase dragged on longer than usual and it was brutal. Pure agitation. Restlessness. Doom. One day I changed my clothes four times because nothing felt right on my body. Nothing could soothe me. My lower belly felt swollen. My mood was on the floor. I was exhausted and emotional and furious all at once.

And the maddest part is you still feel alone in it even though nearly every woman you know has experienced some version of the exact same thing. Two of my friends were going through it too. We were essentially just waiting to bleed like Victorian women locked in an attic hoping for release.

And when it finally came, there it was. Relief.

The emotional weight lifted. The swelling eased. I slept properly again. Food tasted nice. I could move my body without resenting it. I could look in the mirror without immediately launching a psychological attack on myself.

Absolutely insane behaviour from the human body really when you think about it.

Roll on next month. No seriously. Surely it cannot be that bad next month. Can it?

I do not have answers for how women fix this lifelong battle with our bodies. I do not know who decided which bodies are good and which are bad. I do not know why fatness became morally loaded while thinness became aspirational and virtuous.

Actually I do know why. Capitalism.

An economy built on women never quite feeling enough is one of the most successful business models ever created. But what I do know is this. Women do not need more commentary. More debate. More public discussion about how we look, age, dress, swell, shrink or exist.

Back off.

Most women are already conducting daily negotiations within themselves anyway. Some days it is a mini battle. Some days it is an all-out war. And occasionally, for one glorious day a month, you feel absolutely unbelievable in your own skin and think perhaps you have finally cracked life altogether before your hormones humble you again 48 hours later.

But maybe there is comfort in admitting it out loud. Maybe there is power in women speaking honestly to each other instead of pretending we are all effortlessly existing in our bodies.

Because underneath all the noise and judgement and impossible standards, most women are just trying to find a way to feel at home in themselves.

Cabin Zero, The bus and Pat x (Travelling in white #reckless)

Almost ten years ago, in 2017, I imposed a no-spend ban on myself for an entire year. No new clothes. Nothing. Not a sock, not a sandal, not even a panic purchase before a night out. If it could be worn, it was off limits.

At the start, it felt mildly dramatic. By day 32, I was twitching slightly every time I walked past a shop window. By day 245, my entire mindset had shifted so significantly that I genuinely started to wonder if most of modern life was just one giant marketing experiment dressed up as self-care.

Because we are programmed now. Relentlessly. Marketed to every waking second by algorithms that know we briefly looked at a linen trouser once in July 2022 and have decided that this is now our entire personality.

Fashion cycles used to move seasonally. Now there is a new viral jacket, trainer, trouser or “elevated basic” every fortnight. Every single scroll presents another woman standing in her hallway doing a full outfit reveal to go and buy hummus in Aldi.

The school run outfit.
The coffee outfit.
The airport outfit.
The Pilates outfit.
The “working from home but still chic” outfit.

Pilates alone has become an entire fashion economy. Not an exercise class. A lifestyle production. There are now women with dedicated activewear wardrobes for movements that largely happen lying horizontally on a reformer bed.

And listen, I enjoy clothes. I love style. I love fashion when it is actually personal. But what we are seeing now is not style. It is performance. People are using social media like they accidentally got commissioned to create a reality television series nobody asked for. Endless documenting. Endless consumption. Endless showcasing of packages arriving from brands with “drops” four times a month.

I am exhausted. Are you?

The strange thing is that all the evidence tells us material things do not create lasting happiness. Every behavioural study. Every person who has stepped away from mass consumerism for five minutes. Every human who has ever decluttered a wardrobe and immediately felt lighter.

Yet somehow, we still behave as though the next beige co-ord is going to heal us spiritually. What social media has really done is convince people they now have a second unpaid full-time job as documentarians of their own existence.

“What I eat in a day.”
“Come with me to do absolutely nothing important.”
“My 6am to 9am before my 9am to 6pm.”

People are burnt out while simultaneously filming themselves becoming burnt out. There are individuals with full time jobs, relationships, families, responsibilities and somehow, they have also convinced themselves the internet urgently requires footage of their overnight oats.

The phone has created this strange layer of unnecessary labour where people now live life twice. Once in real time and once through content production. And then everybody wonders why they are tired?

Time poor is all you hear now. Yet if most people did a genuine audit of how many hours, they spend scrolling, filming, editing, shopping, browsing, comparing, influencing themselves into purchases and watching strangers reorganise fridges online, versus actually being outside, walking, sitting quietly or speaking to another human being, the imbalance would be alarming.

Anyway.

One area where I have absolutely nailed life is travelling light.

I say this with the caveat that I wear very little fabric generally. I love a short, a tank, a halter neck. My packing experience will naturally differ from somebody emotionally attached to a chunky knit and a wide leg trouser.

But I have gone away for three weeks with a 7kg carry on despite having a 30kg baggage allowance. Check-in staff look at me with concern. Friends look at me like I am entering witness protection. Meanwhile I am gliding through that airport.

Travel itself has become increasingly unpleasant. Delays. Stale air. People watching TikToks out loud like we are all trapped in a group project. Strange airport behaviour that can only emerge under fluorescent lighting and mild stress.

My biggest advice is simple. Carry on only. It changes everything.

You actually think about what you are wearing. You visualise yourself there. You pack outfits that work together. Less choice, less stress. Roll everything tightly and move on with your life.

Dark colours are ideal because travelling with white clothing is basically an extreme sport involving coffee spills and unknown substances. Yet I still travel with white shorts because apparently, I enjoy danger.

Training runners are unfortunately now the size of small boats which is deeply irritating from a packing perspective. I refuse to wear athleisure outside exercise. This has always been my stance.

One cardigan or jumper is enough. Wear it on the plane. Drape it over your shoulders at dinner. Tie it around your waist. Use it as a scarf. Revolutionary stuff.

The real freedom though is this.

I have absolutely no commitment in real time to documenting my existence. I simply arrive somewhere and exist there.

There is no pressure for a “European summer look”. No emergency shopping because I need to dress “more French” in Paris or “more coastal” in Spain. Nobody requires evidence that I am emotionally aligned with Portugal through a linen set.

A few years ago, I gate-crashed with Pat our friend’s honeymoon to Malta with what was essentially a chic bag for life. Therese, Amit and Pat witnessed this first hand. Sharma looked at me and simply asked, “Where is all your stuff?” That was all my stuff. And yet over four days I trained, swam, walked, boated, went to beach clubs and ate in a Michelin-starred restaurant perfectly fine.

Back in 2017, during that no-spend year, the biggest relief I discovered was the absence of pressure. I had removed myself entirely from the cycle. I had a built-in excuse not to buy things. I was opting out. And honestly, opting out is underrated.

That same philosophy now applies to how I pack and increasingly how I live. Less choice. Less clutter. Less performing. Less unnecessary consumption disguised as self-expression.

Because the truth is, having less often gives you more. Also, and importantly, more speed through Dublin Airport.

Last month we landed at the furthest possible gate in Terminal 2 at 5.02pm. I was in row 14 and off the plane by 5.08pm. With my trusted CabinZero bag strapped to my back, I sprinted through that airport like Shericka Jackson chasing Olympic qualification and made the 5.15pm Citylink to Galway with one minute to spare.

People said it was an airport record.

That alone is enough to convert me permanently to the religion of owning less.

The only carry on anyone needs, Tobes x

*Not an obituary-he’s alive, well and smoking 60 a day.

Toby came into my life when I least expected it, and I have spent the last ten years living in the quiet certainty that he would never change, never age, and never be anything other than exactly as he is.

He found his way into my gym one cold November morning, as if he had somewhere to be and had simply chosen me as part of the route. He was two years old then, small, full of confidence and curiosity, as though the world had already agreed to revolve around him. In my mind, it still does.

There were a series of slightly ridiculous, almost accidental events that followed our meeting, the kind that make you wonder whether anything is really accidental at all. He stayed. I adjusted everything around him. That was the beginning of it. We have been living in each other’s pockets ever since.

Toby is now twelve, though that number still does not quite sit right with me. It suggests change, but I have always struggled to accept that he is part of time in the same way the rest of us are. He is a prince amongst men, or so people say when they meet him, though his real charm has nothing to do with status or appearance. It is in the way he moves through the world with complete ease, as though he already knows every corner of it.

He came originally from Limerick, and I am fairly sure he carries the scars and stories of that place in ways I will never fully understand. He has lived a colourful life. There was even a moment, early on, when he was nearly taken and found his way to a house party. It did not last long. His charm, as it turns out, extends well beyond physical spaces. Social media found him, the story spread, and within hours there were hundreds of messages, nearly a thousand retweets, and a collective determination that Toby would be returned home. And he was.

He has always had this independence. He would wander the neighbourhood as though it is his own private estate, greeting nothing and no one as a stranger. He loves the outdoors, the rhythm of walking, the idea of cycling alongside me in his basket on our town bike, head lifted into the wind like it is exactly where he is meant to be. Swimming, however, is not part of his personality. He has made this very clear.

He is a small dog, never more than six kilos, yet somehow he takes up more space than most things in the house. He runs up and down the stairs twelve times a day, often forgetting why he went up in the first place. He arrives upstairs, pauses, considers the mystery of his own intention, then leaves again as though the answer might be downstairs after all.

At home, he becomes a kind of soft centre to everything. He will place himself in the exact middle of the bed with complete authority, slowly nudging you to the edge as if you are the guest and he is simply accommodating your presence. He finds the warmest point behind your knees, or if you are lucky, your arm, and settles there with a sigh that feels like agreement with the world. He hums and snores in a way that is almost musical. It is one of the most ordinary, perfect things I know.

He also moves through the house like a man with appointments he does not fully understand but feels obliged to attend. His big brown chair is his daily resting place, though even there he will remind himself every so often that he might need to go outside, usually about six times an hour. He is busy in a way that makes no sense and yet feels completely intentional.

A friend and neighbour Brian brought over a fleece lined bag bed for him, a simple gesture that changed everything. I had been carrying him around more than I care to admit, and this felt like a small solution to a large devotion. Toby discovered the bed in the kitchen as soon as it arrived. He stepped into it like he had been waiting for it his entire life. Since then, he has spent most of his time in it, fully aware that it means travel and adventure, but that rest is now mobile. He can sleep on demand.

There is something about caring for him in his later years that has changed how I understand love. He has lost his sight now, and his hearing comes and goes in a way that feels selective, almost humorous if it were not so tender. He trusts more deeply because of it. He leans in rather than away. He listens with something other than his ears.

I think often about what it means to learn care from an animal. There is a kind of honesty in it that strips everything back. There are no expectations, no performance, no future bargaining. Just presence. Just showing up. I have found myself thinking that if more people understood this kind of relationship, something essential might shift in how we treat one another. Not because it is simple, but because it is true.

Toby has taught me that love is not something you explain. It is something you practise, repeatedly, in small daily acts that feel ordinary until you step back and realise they are everything. He has also taught me that time is not always linear. I still catch myself expecting him to remain unchanged, as though he is outside the rules of ageing, as though his small body is exempt from the quiet passage of years.

Of course, he is not.

And so I find myself caring for him with a depth I did not know I had. Carrying him up stairs when he is tired. Lifting him into places he once reached on his own. Watching him sleep more, move a little slower, but still insist on going outside when he has already been out six times that hour.

He is still the same Toby. That is the strange and beautiful part. He has not become someone else. He has simply become more himself.

And I think that is what I never understood when he first arrived, as if from nowhere, on that cold November morning. I thought I had found a dog who would fit into my life. What I actually found was a way of understanding love, time, care, and the quiet responsibility of being chosen by something so entirely loyal.

Toby did not stop time. He just made me wish he could.

If it ain’t broke… The system is not broken. It has collapsed under its own assumptions, its blind spots, and its refusal to evolve at the speed of human reality. It has burned through people, extracted labour it never properly valued, and called imbalance “normal” for long enough that we almost stopped noticing it.

The system has crashed. And what comes next cannot be a repair job on something that was never designed with enough perspective in the first place. This is not maintenance work. This is redesign.

I am here because of the women who stood before me. Women who spoke when it was inconvenient. Women who stayed silent when speaking would have cost them everything. Women who raised children, ran homes, built communities, carried grief, carried joy, and carried entire systems on their backs without ever being credited for the architecture of it all.

I always find myself saying this when I am mentoring or speaking. It is not a line. It is a truth I feel in my bones. We are the continuation of something much older than us.

And yet, right now, the world feels deeply out of balance. We are living in a time where things that were once unspoken are now being said aloud, sometimes even rewarded. The better angels of our nature are still here, but they are sharing the stage with noise, with ego, with a kind of confidence that is not always rooted in care or awareness.

So much of what we call “systems” was designed in an era that did not include the full spectrum of human experience. These systems were built by men, for men, and then scaled outward as if that perspective was neutral. It was not neutral. It was partial.

And here is the irony that sometimes makes me smile in the middle of the seriousness: it is a little embarrassing, really, when a system starts to fail under the exact assumptions it was built on, and the response is to double down on those same assumptions.

There is a brilliance in Elizabeth Lesser’s Cassandra Speaks that names something many of us have felt but not always had language for. Cassandra, the mythological figure, was cursed to tell the truth and not be believed. Lesser uses her voice as a lens for all the women who have spoken clearly across history and were either dismissed, ignored, or reinterpreted until their meaning was softened into something more palatable.

That idea sits with me. How often truth is not missing, it is simply not listened to.

And so much of what we are living through now, from gender based violence to inequality in opportunity, from unpaid care work to the strain on families and governments, is not new. It is just more visible. The difference is not always the problem itself, but our willingness to finally look at it.

One of the most overlooked structural truths is care. Women have carried the majority of unpaid care work for generations. Emotional labour, childcare, elder care, the invisible glue of households and communities. Now, as women have gained more autonomy, education, and professional ambition, systems are beginning to react as if something unexpected has happened.

Birth rates are questioned. Childcare systems strain. Economies scratch their heads, as if this is a mystery rather than a predictable outcome of imbalance. But nothing about this is mysterious.

If a system relies on invisible labour, and that labour becomes visible or no longer freely given in the same way, the system will feel it. That is not collapse. That is feedback.

And still, even as we talk about equality, the double standards remain familiar. Women are expected to be composed but not cold, ambitious but not intimidating, caring but not self-sacrificing in ways that inconvenience others. They are expected to carry emotional intelligence like an unpaid subscription service, always available, always running in the background.

There is a phrase I heard once that has stayed with me: the lion’s share. Except in practice, it becomes the lioness’s share. The emotional labour, the remembering, the noticing, the smoothing over, the holding together of things that would otherwise fall apart quietly.

And yet I do not want this to become only an inventory of imbalance. That is not the point. The point is what we do next. Because there is another truth that sits alongside all of this. Systems are not fixed. They are designed. And anything designed can be redesigned.

But redesign requires perspective. It requires voices from different lived experiences. It requires women, yes, but also men who are willing to examine themselves honestly, not defensively. It requires age, youth, culture, difference, contradiction. It requires people who are willing to be in conversation rather than performance.

We do not move forward by sharpening the same old tools. We move forward by widening the table. And change, I think, is rarely global in the beginning. It is local. It is personal. It starts in homes where children are taught emotional literacy. In workplaces where leadership is measured by impact rather than dominance. In communities where care is valued as infrastructure, not afterthought.

I think often about Ireland, about the weight of the past not so long ago. The grip of institutions that shaped behaviour through shame and silence. There are people still alive who carry that imprint in their bodies. And yet there is also something extraordinary in how quickly culture can soften when truth is spoken aloud and held collectively.

That is the work now. To speak. To listen. To build differently.

To choose voices of compassion and ambition in leadership, not as opposites but as partners. To make space for women of every age and background and colour not as symbols of inclusion, but as architects of the future. To understand that equality is not a favour being granted, it is a correction being made.

And yes, there is fatigue in all of this. There is the reality of burnout, of being “the vocal one,” of being seen as difficult simply for refusing silence. That is real.

But I also think of all the women who came before us who did not have the language, or the safety, or the platforms we now have. And still they moved things forward in ways that allowed us to even ask these questions out loud.

That is not small. So maybe this is what I want to leave here today.

Not a conclusion, but a continuation.

A reminder that we are part of something ongoing. That systems are not inevitable. That care is not invisible unless we agree to ignore it. That leadership without empathy eventually collapses under its own weight. And that speaking, even imperfectly, still matters.

The house was already in motion before anyone left it.

Keys, voices, the small urgency of a GAA match in Salthill, and me standing in the middle of it in denim shorts and white sandals, told I was too young.

When they were gone, there was only Veronica Taylor in the porch, a deck of cards and a cigarette burning down to its own time.

It came back to me properly after reading a Lucy Caldwell story, The Day He Met Jesus. That sense of being slipped backwards through someone else’s telling of a life, where nothing much is happening on the surface but everything is already loaded with meaning you only recognise later. A grandfather’s story half listened to, half dismissed, and then remembered years on with that slightly uncomfortable sting of recognition. It made me think of how easily we miss the people right in front of us while being entirely convinced we are the main event.

It brought me straight back to my granny, Veronica Taylor.

And the day I was left behind.

That is how I tell it, with a bit of drama. I was six or maybe eight, though I always say I was older, because I always felt older, like I had arrived early to my own life and nobody had quite adjusted the schedule. My brother and sister were going to a very big GAA match in Salthill. My father was the manager, so that alone made it feel like a national emergency. My mother went too, of course she did. Everyone went.

Except me.

I was told I was too young, which is a phrase that sounds gentle but lands like a full sentence with no appeal process. My siblings did not care much. I was the youngest, a position in the family that came with limited authority and a lot of standing near doors you were not meant to go through. I would argue I was far more interesting than both of them. My brother had sport and very little imagination. My sister was already deep in the early formation of teenage cool, which requires absolute commitment to ignoring younger siblings as a lifestyle choice.

So they left.

I remember the car pulling away like it had somewhere important to be, which it did, and nobody looking back, which they did not. I stood there in my denim shorts, white sandals and t shirt, dressed like summer had briefly taken human form, and watched the whole thing disappear down the road.

And then I went back inside.

Veronica Taylor was already in the porch. Cards on the table, cigarettes never far from her hand, the whole arrangement moving at its own steady pace. She loved cards. She loved cigarettes. In my memory they belong together completely, like one is useless without the other. The sharp slap of 25 onto the table. The slow exhale of a Carrolls cigarette drifting out the door.

I, for my part, loved neither.

Granny dealt cards. Or more accurately, she dealt cards and I existed nearby, occasionally participating, mostly misunderstanding. The rules of 25 were flexible in her hands. Everything was flexible in her hands. She would talk as she played, cigarette balanced between her fingers, ash seemingly optional, like it knew better than to interfere.

She was chatty in the way she was with everyone. There was no sudden emotional reveal waiting underneath. Just rhythm. Smoke. Cards. Talk. Smoke. Cards. Talk.

I, meanwhile, was elsewhere entirely.

I was at the match in my head. I was in Salthill, in the crowd, in the noise, in the version of events where I mattered more than I actually did. I built entire scenes of importance while sitting in a quiet porch with a woman who had already lived through far more life than I could have understood at that age.

It was not that I did not like her. It was that I did not know how to locate her properly in the world yet.

That is the part I recognise now. That strange shift that happens later, when memory stops being just recall and starts becoming interpretation. The regret that arrives quietly, not as guilt exactly, but as awareness that you were physically present and emotionally somewhere else entirely.

She never really told stories about herself in any structured way that reached me then. Not properly. I learned more about her life in her absence than I ever did while she was alive. That feels very Irish to me now, though I would not have had the language for it at the time. Things said and not said. Stories hinted at but never fully offered. A kind of conversational half-light where everything important is understood but rarely spoken aloud.

She was from a different Ireland. One where children were seen and not heard, though she did not enforce it in any strict sense. It was just embedded in the air of things. She had lived through loss that sat quietly in the background of everything. Children gone. A husband lost at 64. Grief folded into daily life so completely it almost looked like routine.

And still, she sat there with me in that porch, smoking and playing cards, as if the afternoon had no need to explain itself.

There is something funny in it now. The two of us sharing that space. Her entirely at ease with the slow machinery of the day. Me convinced I had been excluded from something far more important. Her cigarettes and cards marking time without fuss. My boredom sitting beside her like it belonged there too.

I can see it clearly now. The ash rising. The cards dealt. Her hand steady. My attention drifting constantly towards a life I believed was happening somewhere else. And yet, when I think of her now, I do not sentimentalise it.

I just see the contradiction. Because two things can be true at the same time. I can have been bored, restless and mildly insulted at being left behind. And I can have been exactly where I needed to be, sitting in the porch with Veronica Taylor, watching smoke rise through a summer I did not yet know how to keep.