Caroline O'Donoghue: Three ways to talk about 2020

"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."

When I first agreed to take on this column at the end of 2019, I did so with a little bit of nerves. I’d been a columnist for other Irish papers, off and on, and over the years had often run into the same problem: that I was an Irish writer, living in England. I could not react to Irish news stories, because I didn’t have the context of living in the country they were affecting to draw on. 

I couldn’t write about English news stories, because frankly, who wants that from an Irish columnist? I had often felt a little stuck between a rock and a hard place as a columnist, and worried whether I was taking the job away from a writer living in Ireland, who could do the job much better.