Happily Self-Segregated in my Rainbow-Coloured Safe Space   ‘Irish American News’, September 2019     The world is confusing me – again.  Nothing new there; it seems that a week doesn’t go past lately that I don’t feel as if I’ve fallen ass-first down the rabbit hole. I mean, didn’t Ireland fairly recently have a referendum on equality for the gay and lesbian community, with equal marriage rights and all that good stuff? And didn’t the population overwhelmingly show that they’re not too bothered about interfering in other people’s sex lives? There ye go, I thought to myself; we won’t have to listen to any more of this eye-watering stuff about a gay community and a straight community.  It’ll just be the Community, the way that it should be. It turns out that would have been ‘way  too much to hope for.  Now that we’re all happily equal it turns out that the LGBT community (yes, we’re back to separate communities again) don’t actually want to be treated like everyone else after all.  From September the University of Limerick will be granting requests for student accomodation that will be available for those who are gay, lesbian or transgender. Presumably there will also be accomodation for those who are pansexual, gender fluid or who ‘identify’ as dolphins; but let’s not go there:  as I say, I’m confused enough as it is. Because this isn’t the ‘straight’ community that is imposing some sort of segregation; this is the LGBT themselves.  Oh yeah… and the scheme is called ‘rainbow housing’.  Well, of course it is. Here’s Dr. Amanda Haynes to enlighten us.  She is the co-director of Limerick University’s Hate and Hostility Research Group (a First World job if ever there was one) and she says that “rainbow housing is not about self-segregation. ... Full Article →

Welcoming Trump…and Other Words We Mustn’t Use   ‘Irish American News’, July 2019.     I’ve been thinking lately about climate change.  And about golliwogs. There you go:  if talk of climate change has begun to bore you as much as it does me then that word – ‘golliwogs’ – probably grabbed back your attention. It is one of the many words that are no longer acceptable in polite company.  It’s a relic of a past where hurtful and casually racist expressions were used regularly.  Yet those of you who are old enough to remember it will recall seeing that bizarre caricature that it represented for much of your early life, when it peered out at you, unremarked on, from the labels of Robinson’s jam jars. It is an image that has quite rightly been consigned to History’s overflowing rubbish bin.  After all, we’re all a bit more ‘woke’ now… supposedly, in any case.  But it came back to mind recently due to – of all things – the visit here to Ireland of President Donald Trump. I was listening to the usual hysterics getting themselves into a right old trousers-wetting frenzy about the cheek of the man to come here on a private visit, conveniently forgetting that he had in fact been invited by then-Taoiseach Enda Kenny.  (Lord, was that only just over two years ago?  It feels like a lifetime.) And it seems to me that if you invite someone to your home then you at least have manners enough to be a good host.  And in the main Ireland was that, I’m glad to say.  In fact, apart from the expected contingent of headbangers who were out there demonstrating against the visit – the visit of a sitting American President who also actually employs people in this... Full Article →