Catholic Church

This week on Fireside is Episode 60: The Faeries on Judgement Day. A return to Irish folk tales this week as we tell a story from County Clare, where the most viscous faeries live, and the story of why they’re so... Get in touch with…

I have been faithless for the entirety of my adulthood. As a teenager growing up in the Parkhead tradition, I carried Catholicism like a banner, believing in God because he was our god, the Irish god, something that our postcolonial…

Mancando means dying away. It is one of the many Italian musical terms my guitar teacher hands me to learn off as the news breaks of the Notre Dame cathedral; as it was mancando. The pictures displayed it in blazing rapture. I mentioned it,…

St. Mary’s Church stands at the edge of a forest. A path goes from the wrought iron gate through the old graveyard of leaning headstones and into the pines. Sunlight glitters on the surface of the lake that lies behind the trees; a lake…

A brave new world! Glenn and Steph bask in the aftermath of the referendum on the 8th Amendment and ponder what’s next for a society absolutely gagging for an overhaul?  On The Suss this week: There’s loads to digest as notions of ‘Middle…

The 8th Amendment was enshrined in law only months before I was conceived to my 23 year old mother. I often wonder what possessed my young liberal, atheist Irish parents to start a family in that oppressive atmosphere of 1984. In the space…

Almost exactly five years ago, I attended the Commission on the Status of Women, an annual event at the UN in New York dedicated to women’s rights. It’s quite a big deal, attracting government officials, politicians and academics as well as…

‘I grabbed you by the gilded beams, That’s what tradition means.’ The Smiths, I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish. Last year, having skipped over it during my undergraduate years, I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. One…

'I cannot again appear before the public in so unseemly a character as that of a writer of romances, without regretting the necessity that compels me to it. Did my profession furnish me with the means of subsistence, I should hold myself…

Reproductive rights in Ireland, inclusive of access to and the legalisation of contraception and abortion, is an issue that disproportionately affects women, yet remains unresolved. Only fully legalised in 1993, contraception in Ireland has…