You can shop locally, you can still support small Irish businesses and get beautiful presents that your family will adore, from artisan chocolate to world class skincare.

"It’s fine for adults to say that it’s just one year, that things will be back to normal by Halloween 2021, but that can feel like a lifetime when you’re a kid. Just like us, they need their small pleasures too."

When all of the sympathy is reserved for those being ‘cancelled’, how much is left over for the vulnerable people hurt by their actions?

"Maybe that’s why I feel so on edge this week: because there doesn’t seem to be one clear-cut answer, one definitive path to safety. And the stakes are too high to countenance any errors."

I can’t just ask to use the toilet, over and over again. That’s the sort of behaviour that freaks people out.

I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw the photo. Black and white, two young Irish actors with sunglasses on, a cigarette in one hand, a takeaway coffee cup in the other.

When I decided to become an author, these aren’t the books I thought I would be writing

My new novel came out this week, I’m not sure if you heard? (After the Silence, available now!) I was led by the publicist – another Cork woman, naturally – to bookshops and TV studios and radio stations, where she pretended like she wasn’t bored of ...

I looked at my diary this morning and I realised that it is exactly ten years since I left for New York and it feels both impossible and inevitable that a decade could have passed. It wasn’t my idea to go.

Why the urge to post a photo of yourself lying by the pool abroad when you know it’s going to cause seething resentment in everyone back home