From Jennifer O’Connell: By Jennifer O’Connell
I can see why Brian Cowen might be said to suffer from an image deficit.  Or, say, Lindsay Lohen. Or Mel Gibson. Or Simon Cowell, Ivor Callely or Sean Fitzpatrick.
But the concept is a little bit more difficult to understand in the context of the 16.8 million Pakistanis, who have [...]

From Jennifer O’Connell: By Jennifer O’Connell On my wedding day, I walked down the aisle wearing a simply cut, floor length, ivory silk dress, a pair of sublime five inch strappy cream sandals, and a fat, swollen eye. The dress was adapted from a design I’d seen Kate Hudson wear in a movie, the shoes were by [...]

From Jennifer O’Connell: By Jennifer O’Connell Even with the passage of more than a decade, the facts of the case lose none of their power to shock. The cold carpark at Bagenal Court in Carlow town on a February evening. A young woman, locking up, bringing the takings to her car. Out of nowhere, the thump. [...]

From Jennifer O’Connell: By Jennifer O’Connell
So there I was, busy doing what I am most often to be found doing on deadline day – eating chocolate, listening to iTunes, obsessively checking my Twitterfeed and waiting for some pictures to upload on Facebook, whilst reading an obscure article on how technology is shaping children’s language development [...]

From Jennifer O’Connell: By Jennifer O’ConnellHer name was Ruth.
She had another name, a name from Nigeria, but she preferred not to use it.
Too many painful memories, perhaps.
She was 15 years old when she was sent to Dublin by her grandmother, who hoped she might make a life for herself here, after the rest of her [...]

From Jennifer O’Connell: By Jennifer O’ConnellThe HSE once lost a file on my child. There’s nothing unusual in this – almost everyone has a story of HSE incompetence.The incident, though not serious, gave me a brief insight – a mere shadow of the kind of insight the whole country has been getting over the past seven [...]

From Jennifer O’Connell: By Jennifer O’ConnellAs I watched Senator David Norris talk to Ryan Tubridy on the Late Late Show recently about his presidential hopes, I found myself experiencing a creeping discomfort.
Not because of his sexuality; I think Norris would make an inspiring, effective and unifying President for many reasons, just one of them his [...]

From Jennifer O’Connell: By Jennifer O’ConnellIt’s hard to imagine now, but once upon a time, motherhood was a pretty straightforward enterprise. In the 1934 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘mother’ was defined as follows: ‘‘Woman who looks after children.”
Nowadays, it’s a lot more complicated. ‘Parent’ is no longer just a noun; it’s a verb too. [...]

From Jennifer O’Connell: By Jennifer O’ConnellI’ve always had an affinity with the journalist and bestselling novelist Allison Pearson. This may be because of the night in February 2008 when I was sitting up in bed, reading her last novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, a semi-autobiographical account of the life of a working [...]

From Jennifer O’Connell: By Jennifer O’ConnellThe facts, by now, hardly bear repeating. On a desolate January day in the Massachusetts town of South Hadley, a girl called Phoebe Prince – young, beautiful, Irish, full of life and promise – closed the door of her rented family home behind her, and shut the world out for [...]