Writing up a storm

The Noughties: From Glitz to Gloom

“All things being equal, if it came to a choice between placing a child with a heterosexual couple or a gay couple, I really think the adoption authorities have no right to send that child to a same sex couple. Which formula produced this child? It was a man and a woman. I’m sorry; it’s inconvenient but that’s the fact,” she says in her soft voice which becomes animated when she’s driving home a point. What also annoyed the gay community was Power’s ridiculing of drag artist and gay activist, Miss Panti, aka Rory O’Neill.

“I basically called him a bloke in a dress.”

Power’s comments drew an avalanche of complaint.

“Some of them were extremely nasty and vile. It was about trying to silence me and also warning off other people from going down this line. But I have to say that not all gay people are like that. Most of the gay people I know are perfectly ordinary individuals who don’t go on with hysteria.”

But Power defies easy categorisation. She describes her political leanings as being mostly centre, sometimes liberal and occasionally right-wing.

“Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of the small mind,” she says, quoting the champion of individualism, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Hailing from a farm in Mullinavat in Co Kilkenny, Power had a traditional upbringing. “We used to kneel down and say the rosary every night. My parents had this thing that switching the telly on and off was bad for us. While we were praying, they’d hang a sheet of newspaper over the telly and turn the sound down. If you got to kneel at the chair under the telly, you’d be able to keep an eye on what was going on.”

Moving to “the big smoke” to study journalism at the then College of Commerce, Rathmines, in 1980, Power went to Mass every Sunday. These days, she describes herself as an a la carte Catholic who occasionally goes to Mass and whose five children have all been baptised and receive the sacraments.

Power decided on journalism “as English was my good subject and my best friend was doing journalism”.

Separated from boxer turned barrister Mel Crystal, Power worked as a barrister for a couple of years. These days, she works from home and considers her arrangement ideal for writing and rearing children aged six to 16.

Power holds no truck with feminism. “Women are just too quick to resort to victimhood. The battle is largely won. I know women aren’t paid as much as men. But I just get so impatient when I hear women banging out the old line that it’s always them who have to pick up the kids or stay at home if the minder doesn’t show up.”

In Power’s case, a woman’s place is in the home, albeit churning out attention-grabbing columns that sometimes incense the chattering classes and no doubt delight her editors.