Black florals on a long dress for an adult woman is just bad. It’s ‘I’m spicing up my widowhood, but not so much that my dowager aunt will give me hassle'

The space between International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day has been occupied by one of the most terrifying crimes against a woman who had taken the exact level of risk that any of us would be comfortable taking.

I have a handful of very close female friendships and all of them have one thing in common which is that we cannot stop touching each other.

"I can’t help but think, as we devise a new system for the Leaving Cert, that we can’t strip out the whole thing and start again"

I am not the kind of young I used to be: the kind of young where you insist you are not like other girls, that you do not need what they need, do not want the things they want. 

Prioritise it like the vaccine: the elderly and the infirm first, because they need the biggest laugh, then the teachers, whose nerves must be shot. Then, the chronically dull.

A few days ago, at the end of another long, grey, cold day of lockdown, utterly identical to the one before it, I looked up at the sky and audibly gasped at what I saw.

— Do You Need Your Shopping Done? I Am Irish But I Won’t Steal Your Gate

"...me being a foreigner in his country gives me a sort of below-deck-on-the-Titanic appeal. The ‘manic paddy dream girl’ effect, as I like to call it..."

"The pandemic has been awful for a lot of reasons, but it has been a columnist’s dream. For once, everyone in both England and Ireland was going through the exact same thing at the exact same time."