Where was the media’s due diligence on Ivan Yates?

Justine McCarthy’s column in The Irish Times yesterday. How correct she is. 

It is heartwarming to see a journalist criticise her own trade; a sign of a healthy profession. Need for far more  of it in every grouping across society.

The inconvenient truth for bosses in the news media is that Fianna Fáil’s hiring of Ivan Yates as a communication coach has been public knowledge for almost four years. The Irish Daily Mail reported on January 2nd, 2022, that the party’s head of communications, Siobhán Russell, had recruited the former Fine Gael minister and bookie. It quoted Fianna Fáil Senator Fiona O’Loughlin as saying the training “was certainly worthwhile”.

Ten days later, the Clare Echo reported that local TD Cathal Crowe had attended a three-hour Fianna Fáil workshop on media interview skills given by Yates. “He was a hardball interviewer himself,” the paper quoted Crowe. “He played out interview scenarios with those of us in attendance.”

The national airwaves have been crackling with journalists demanding to know why Fianna Fáil did not inform its Coalition partner that it employed Yates to train its presidential candidate, Jim Gavin. The bigger question of why national broadcasting bosses kept trotting Yates out as a supposedly objective current affairs presenter-cumcommentator without any declaration of his conflicting interests went unasked. It’s time the media C-suite removed the mote from its own eye. The scandal at the heart of this controversy is not a political one. It is a media scandal.

TV3 – Virgin Media’s forerunner – knowingly opted for shock-jock audience ratings over journalistic ethics when it employed Yates to present the Tonight Show in September 2013. His Celtic Bookmakers chain of gambling shops had gone into receivership owing €6 million to AIB, precipitating his departure to Wales for a year’s bankruptcy exile. In a newspaper interview, he accused the bank of vindictiveness and of harassing and intimidating his family. The bank issued a statement of denial. Two days after Yates emerged from bankruptcy, he presented the TV3 show “asking if banks are doing enough to tackle Ireland’s mortgage arrears problems”, according to a report on the promo. “We’ll also look ahead to the new Personal Insolvency arrangement due to begin next week. Will they work for debtors or will the banks still hold the balance of power?”

To defuse the brass-neckery of this screaming conflict of interest, Yates delivered a disclaimer at the start of the show, seeking to “assure viewers that my own views will not impede me from carrying out a fair and balanced debate on the issue”.

The arsenal of the fake revolutionary

Yates is a professional provocateur. “Bullshit” is one of his trademark words. “Arsed” – as in “I couldn’t be” – is another. His “smear the bejaysus out of her” has entered the Irish lexicon of quotable turpitude. Find it above “picked it out of my arse” (Anglo Irish Bank’s John Bowe) and “will we f**k?” (property developer Mick Bailey). A son of establishment cloth, Yates equips himself with the arsenal of the fake revolutionary. He scorns the “woke media” that has given him the platform to charge someone €1,500, according to figures quoted in 2021, for a day’s media training. He has not hidden his disregard for journalistic standards. On the contrary, he has paraded it as core to his CV.

On his last edition as presenter of the Hard Shoulder, he signed off saying he had “derided [and] ridiculed everyone that has come on the line against me”. He thanked Newstalk for putting up with the complaints from listeners and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland. “I just want you to know that, yes, some of it is contrived because we’re in the business of being different.”

That business is called entertainment.

The danger is that many people mistake it for journalism. Broadcasting executives collude in this misconception by blurring the demarcation lines. Stations such as Newstalk, when it was owned by Communicorp, and the erstwhile TV3, turn willing loudmouths into current affairs presenters and, next thing, they are appearing on RTÉ as commentators. See the rise and fall of George Hook. How curious that RTÉ postponed a Scannal documentary on the Moriarty tribunal report during the presidential election campaign but seems to have had no compunction about featuring Yates as an ostensibly impartial commentator in the four years since he began training Fianna Fáilers.

In the US, ex-Fox News controversialists are now kingpins in the department of war, negotiating America’s relations with Israel, Ukraine and Russia, advising on national security and running the FBI. At White House briefings, the clock at question time is run down by quasijournalist podcasters brought in to massage Donald Trump’s ego. Eroding the distinction between journalism and performance is the start of a treacherously slippery slope.

The demarcation lines have been further smudged here by the departure of more than a dozen journalists from the news media who are now working for the Government. A big reason is that journalists, who are professionally required to comply with linguistic and ethical standards, are in general not lavishly paid – unlike certain celebrity shock-jocks.

Coaching its candidate

Yates presented Pat Kenny’s Newstalk show on September 24th, the day nominations closed for the presidential election and the day after he started coaching its candidate. “Jim Gavin has a clear run in Dublin,” he remarked on air, declaring geography would be a factor in the election. On Gavin’s GAA credentials, he opined that “the network of clubs – junior clubs even – runs deep in the psyche of people’s sense of identity”. When programme guest Sineád O’Carroll, editor of The Journal, noted Gavin’s lack of charisma, Yates responded: “The public don’t really know him yet.”

On October 11th on the Path to Power podcast, from which he has been dropped, he speculated that the rent overpayment Gavin then owed to a former tenant – which proved to be the downfall of his campaign – could have gone to the bank that held the mortgage on the property. “It would not surprise me if Jim did not get the benefit of this money,” he surmised.

These utterances may have been valid but they assume significance after Yates’s failure to declare his own commercial interest in Gavin’s success. When he delivered a podcast riff last January on Darragh O’Brien potentially becoming Fianna Fáil’s next leader, he did not mention he had coached the Minister for Transport for the 2024 general election.

This information was in the public domain. Journalists have grilled Fianna Fáil for failing to do adequate due diligence before selecting Gavin as its candidate. But where was the broadcast media’s due diligence when it selected Yates?

Orange Order makes a complaint to King Charles

The Orange Order writes to King Charles criticising him for praying with Pope Leo.

Difficult to fathom.

https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2025/11/06/orange-order-sends-letter-of-complaint-to-king-charles-after-he-prayed-with-pope-leo/

What have insurance companies and thieves in common?

Maybe there is a reader out there

who can explain this road sign? 

A new coffee shop has opened close to this bridge; it means there are constantly vehicles parked on both sides of the bridge which has a single white line the length of it. The rules of the road seem to suggest such parking on a bridge with a continuous white line is illegal; such parking is certainly unsafe and causing concern to residents.

On the subject of cars and traffic; the owner of a motorbike shop was overheard saying that insurance companies are as good at stealing as are the honest-to-god thieves.

It’s worth a thought.

It’s no laughing matter being in a dark place, feeling down

This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Michael Commane

Over the years I have often written in this column about how frustrating it can be attempting to speak to a human voice when calling some facility or other. I’ve often been left waiting more than 10, 15 minutes to speak to an agent.

This Friday, November 7 is the deadline for submitting Local Property Tax (LPT) returns.

Last Thursday I happened to hear some mention of the deadline approaching on radio and television. I began to panic. Yes, I had received the letter from Revenue but put it aside on the day, intending to deal with it later, and then forgot about it.

Have you ever noticed when you are down, feel depressed, can’t do anything, that it is so easy to worry about the smallest things you have to do; everything takes on a significance away beyond its reality. 

In some ways I’m slow to say this but in recent weeks I’ve been in a dark place; found myself wondering what everything is about, indeed, that terrible feeling of failure. Half jokingly, half seriously I say to myself there are advantages in being superficial; it helps to move relatively easily from a dark to a somewhat brighter place.

Being in a dark place makes one, it certainly makes me, more conscious of what it must be like for people who suffer all forms of psychological health issues. 

Note, I didn’t call them mental health issues; that frightens me.

There are times when in a dark place it’s close to impossible to communicate with people, you simply shut yourself off from the world. But sometimes a kind or sympathetic word can open a curtain. How can kindness go astray?

It’s difficult to deal with the day-to-day business when down and depressed and it was in that mood I happened to hear the warnings about paying my LPT by November 7. More panic. 

I use a computer most days of my life; I’m not saying I’m a whizkid but it’s one of my work tools. And yet when it came to completing the LPT on line I felt incapable of doing it. I was even scared to phone the number at the top of the letter. I eventually decided to call 01 - 738 3626. 

Of course I was kept waiting, was this just to annoy me? Eventually I got through to Greta. I did not tell her the full story but I did say I was confused by it all. She could not have been nicer, we began to chat, even a few jokes were exchanged. 

What a skill this woman had. Having given her my Property ID and PIN, she opened my file and told me she could do it all for me right there and then over the phone. What a relief it was. Will she ever know how she helped me and in more ways than one. And top marks to Revenue for having a person of Greta’s calibre at the other end of a phone line.

Do we ever know what’s going on in another person’s head? No, and that surely means we need to treat one another with care and empathy. We really need to try. I know that and to my shame I don’t always do it. 

The Catholic thinker behind JD Vance’s conversion

An opinion piece in The Irish Times yesterday written by Joe Humphreys.

Philosopher René Girard developed a theory of scapegoating. The US vice-president has weaponised it

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How should world leaders deal with the Trump administration?

Most presidents and prime ministers are opting for flattery and servility. But the head of the Catholic Church is different.

Pope Leo XIV’s first Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi te, published last month, could not be less Maga-like. Emphasising the duty of Christians to serve the poor, it condemns “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation”. This is awkward for JD Vance, who previously clashed with the pope, when he was mere Cardinal Robert Prevost, over their very different understandings of Jesus’s teaching.

Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 – a few years before he converted to Trump (having previously likened him to “America’s Hitler”). He later wrote about that transformation, crediting the French philosopher René Girard (1923-2015) for helping him to ditch his atheist ways.

Who was Girard, and can he help to explain Vance’s brand of Christianity? Dermot Roantree has been researching Vance’s faith in his role as editor of the Irish Jesuit journal Studies. He offers some enlightenment as this week’s Unthinkable guest.

Girard is associated with mimetic theory. What’s that about?

“It was that human desire is imitative: we come to desire things by seeing them desired by others. To use a simple example that Girard himself gave: If you place two toddlers in a room full of toys, as soon as one shows interest in a particular toy that toy becomes an object of desire for the other. Such mirrored desires lead to rivalry, which in turn gives rise to escalating and contagious violence.“In early societies, Girard held, it was the need to contain this violence that led to sacrificial rituals as a means of purging the source of conflict and restoring social cohesion. Internal conflict would be channelled towards a single target – an innocent scapegoat who would then be cast out or destroyed . . .

“As societies evolved, the sacrificial mechanism was transformed into other means of conflict containment that didn’t entail open bloodshed, such as legal systems, civic institutions, and moral or ritual traditions. But these substitutions are fragile. When they weaken or are disregarded, the underlying sacrificial logic re-emerges. Societies revert to building group cohesion by excluding or persecuting the ‘enemy’ – a person perhaps, but often a group, an ideology, or even a historical construct.”

Where does religion come into this analysis?

“Religion is at the heart of it. Girard held that the earliest rituals and sacrifices served to legitimise the violence of the scapegoat mechanism, representing it as necessary for social order and sanctioned by the gods. “But for Girard, who returned to the Catholicism of his childhood as he developed his anthropology, the Judeo-Christian narrative tradition, while it shares in this mythic structure, at the same time turns it on its head. Uniquely, the Bible takes the side of the victim – think of Job, the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, the lamenting Psalmist, and the widow, orphan and stranger that God’s people were commanded to protect.

“Think too of Christ’s passion. That, for Girard, is the ultimate exposure of the fiction, the lie, at the heart of human progress, namely that those we victimise are actually guilty. By revealing this, precisely through his own innocence, Christ deprives the scapegoat mechanism of its power.”

Which brings on a crisis, as what Christ offers is a more difficult path: “The frightening principle that you shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

How did Girard come to influence JD Vance?

“It was the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel who introduced Vance to Girard’s thought. Thiel, who studied under Girard and became Vance’s mentor, found in the concept of mimetic desire a way to understand competition – to see, for example, the value of investing in Facebook, an ideal vehicle for monetising human imitation and envy.“What Vance, for his part, found in Girard was an anthropology that helped explain the web of conflicts, damaged relations and scapegoating in his Appalachian world and a Christian vision that could break the destructive patterns.”

What other Catholic thinkers have shaped Vance’s thinking?

“Thiel also appears to have introduced Vance to the thought of the German jurist and Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argued that political order requires a strong leader who distinguishes between friends and enemies and acts decisively on that basis, even if it means suspending legal constraints . . .

“This Schmittian perspective is also evident in the Catholic postliberal right – Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule, for example – that had a deep influence on Vance in the lead-up to his conversion and continues to do so.”

Is Vance reading Girard correctly or misinterpreting him?

“Vance understands Girard’s insights well, but his political alignment with Trump has led him to abandon them. Worse, having learned the power of scapegoating, he appears to exploit it rather than expose it . . .“Vance has vigorously defended Trump’s attacks on his perceived enemies . . . As Girard warned, this is precisely what occurs when the restraints on violence . . . are cast aside. Cohesion – in this instance, of the Maga base – is achieved through scapegoating.”

See studiesirishreview.ie, edited by Dermot Roantree

Olivia O’Leary writes on Mary McGee’s Supreme Court case

Below is an interesting column written by Olivia O’Leary in the weekend edition of The Irish Times.

Olivia has tenuous links with the Irish Dominicans. Two Bergins were Dominican priests, Constantius and Joseph, Joseph was a nephew of Constantius. 

Probably a brother of the uncle was editor of the Nationalist and Leinster Times in Carlow. It was he who gave Olivia her first job as a journalist. Over the years Olivia kept in touch with the Bergins.

It was a Father Ted moment. I asked in my local south Dublin pharmacy for a contraceptive item for which I had a doctor’s prescription. “Not in this pharmacy,” said the pharmacist, quivering with indignation.

“Okay, I’ll go somewhere else,” I said. “Do!” said the pharmacist, still quivering. It was 1983 – 10 years since the McGee judgment had ruled that married couples had a right to import contraceptives for their own use and that the law stopping them was unconstitutional. It was four years since Charlie Haughey had brought in his Family Planning Bill, allowing married couples to access contraception with a prescription. But the attitude in some Irish pharmacies, even in supposedly liberal Dublin 4, was still “Down With This Sort of Thing”.

The attitude remained in some quarters that contraception was criminal. Indeed, back in the 1970s, in The Irish Times library, I remember looking for cuttings about contraception to find they were filed under “Crimes sexual” – which was the stark truth at the time. It was a crime to import, sell or advertise contraception.

So it was in that context that Mary “May” McGee, who died this week aged 81, struck a massive blow in the long struggle to release Irish women’s health from the stranglehold of Roman Catholic Church teaching.

Firstly, with her fisherman husband Shay, she helped to move the debate about contraception away from the area of justice and into the area of health.

She had had four children, two of them twins, between 1968 and 1970. Having been unwell after each of the four pregnancies, May’s advice from her doctor was to use a diaphragm, which required the importation of spermicide jelly. It was when customs seized the imported jelly that the case arose.

The legal battle fought by the McGees ended up in the Supreme Court in 1973. The court accepted their argument that they had a right to contraception on the basis of marital privacy. Senator Mary Robinson, who was back then trying to introduce her own Bill legalising contraception, always stressed how important it was to move the debate away from the criminal justice area and into that of women’s reproductive health and choice. The McGees had done that – never more tellingly than when May’s husband, asked in court how he felt about his wife using contraceptives, said: “I’d prefer to see her using contraceptives than be placing flowers on her grave.”

One of the proofs of that change of culture was that it was Haughey as minister for health who introduced the 1979 Bill limiting contraception to married people with a prescription, and Barry Desmond as minister for health who introduced the 1985 legislation that made contraceptives generally available.

But there was something else important that the McGees had done. They had presented the argument for contraception within the context of a loving, equal relationship. Shay McGee feared not only for his wife’s health but for her life. Anyone who grew up in those families with few gaps between babies had some notion of the stress it brought, particularly to the relationship between wife and husband. Quite apart from the economic implications of providing for so many children, there was the worry for couples of endangering a wife’s health, and for wives the worry that their only control – refusing sex – would be seen as a lack of affection. The inability to have a healthy sexual relationship without fear must have been a massive strain.

The reform the McGees started so bravely came to its full legal fruition in 1985, when Desmond’s Health (Family Planning) (Amendment) Act made contraception, including condoms, widely available and without prescription.

By this stage, the contraception debate had entered a new phase – the need to ensure that people not of the Roman Catholic faith were not saddled with Roman Catholic laws. Garret FitzGerald had already launched a constitutional campaign to make this State more acceptable to non-Catholics here and in the North. When Fianna Fáil’s Haughey, then in opposition, decided to oppose the new Bill, Des O’Malley decided to vote for it. In what has since become known as his “I stand by the Republic” speech, he said that a democratic republic “should take account of the reasonable views of all groups, including all minorities, because if we do not take into account the rights of minorities here, can we complain if they are not taken into account . . . anywhere else?”. O’Malley was thrown out of Fianna Fáil for his pains and went on to found another party, but there are many who will argue that that speech was his finest hour.

As for May and Shay McGee, they helped change a world where so many Irish mothers were expected to spend up to 25 years of their adult lives bearing children. I remember talking about women’s health many years ago to a woman of that older generation who had had more than 10 pregnancies. I was asking her about the menopause, which I was about to face into myself. How did she manage the joint pains, the fatigue, the night sweats, the discomfort, I asked. Was it awful?

“No,” she said. “It was fantastic. I knew I would never be pregnant again.”

Olivia O’Leary is a writer and broadcaster

Hungry thoughts on Dublin’s Capel Street on All Saints Day

Christians today recall all

Capel Street on All Saints Day

those who have died, yesterday was the feast of All Saints.

There were celebrations in Dublin City Centre yesterday evening, beginning at 7pm and finishing at 10pm. An evening of music, food and fun. The fun continues today.

Earlier in the afternoon I had an hour to spare in the Capel Street area of Dublin 1.  I was waiting for new batteries to be installed in my laptop and mobile phone by a Mongolian man in a shop that sells and fixes computers, phones, and sells vapes. His colleague was from Brazil. Both men were  friendly, indeed kind, they allowed me leave my bicycle in the shop.

Strolling down Capel Street, it was clear to see the world and its mother was on display. Every second person seemed to speak a different language; all types, sizes, styles, on a cold winter’s day the odd belly button was on display, the young, not too many old, some decrepit, one or two beggars. Capel Street’s pedestrian way allows for all sorts of human extravagance.

I was tired and hungry so I popped into Boyle Sports betting shop. Today’s betting shops are great places to take a break as they are all kitted out with nice comfortable armchairs, some sort coffee machines. Boyle Sports on Capel Street is large, much bigger than it looks from the outside; I must have counted 40 screens; there were up to 30 customers placing bets, all men, not a woman in sight.  It looked as if I were the only freeloader present.

Having rested for 10 to 15 minutes on exiting I saw a man studying the form sheet while at the same time eating a chicken with his hands.

I must have counted 27 self service checkouts in the Lidl store on Moore Street, and was it busy. An assistant told me it is their second busiest shop in Ireland. There was a long queue at the Return machine; a young Brazilian woman had a black sack of empty cans and bottles to dispose. The bag was as tall as she.

On Henry Street people were handing out leaflets titled ‘Is there Hope for the Future’, obviously some religious organisation.

I began to think about where the Catholic Church is in Ireland today. When  I was a little boy and then later as a youth growing into manhood in Ireland the Catholic Church ruled supreme. The churches were full on Sunday, but I can clearly remember my mother saying that when the church would fade, it would collapse over night. What wise words.

The young men I observe heading for priesthood these days remind me of the perfectly suited Mormons I would see going from house-to-house in my youth and they were all young men. I don’t think I ever saw a woman mormon pacing the streets.

When I hear people like Bishop Robert Barron or those on EWTN, most of the Catholic Church material on social media I feel it is directed to a small group of ‘dedicated’ people but it is saying nothing, nothing at all to the vast majority of the people I saw on Capel Street, Henry Street and in Boyle Sports yesterday. Why? Because, in my opinion, the 'church people' are speaking an outdated language. At least that’s my hunch.

The Dominican ideal is a wonderful vision; it’s an attempt at living and speaking the Word of God in a language and style that makes sense to the people in Capel Street, Henry Street and Boyle Sports. But before ever a word is uttered surely it is essential to listen and learn from other people. To me, the word ‘preaching’ is an immediate turn off to the very people with whom we hope to speak.

Personally, I find so much of what is being said is pious cliche, meaningless, words, waffle in 2025.

My cent’s-worth after a 60-minute stroll in Dublin 1 on the feast of All Saints.

The man whose words brought down the Berlin Wall

On this day, November 1, 2015

Günter Schabowski

Günter Schabowski died in Berlin.

It was his words at a press conference in Berlin on November 9, 1989 that led people to head to the Wall.  Border guards were confused, phone calls made but it was now impossible to stop the surge of people arriving at the Wall without opening fire. That never happened and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

Is the world a better place today?

Schabowski moved West, turned against the SED to support the CDU.

Is that what leaders and managers do?

Genuinely change beliefs or always making sure to be on the winning side?

He was born in 1929 in Anklam, then in the Free State of Prussia, now in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Federal Germany.

Worrying words from Merz and some New York voters

Last week German chancellor

Friedrich Merz in calling for large-scale deportations from Germany suggested that parents ‘Ask their daughters’. The chancellor has received much criticism for his remark, which he has tried to water down or ‘explain.

CNN’s John King is covering the upcoming mayoral election in New York. On interviewing voters why they would not vote for Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani a number of people replied, saying 'if a man loved his daughter he could not vote for Mamdani', who is of the Muslim faith.

The New York mayoral election is on Tuesday, November 4.

Below is the article in the Guardian on the Merz comment.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/21/friedrich-merz-accused-of-using-dangerous-rhetoric-on-immigration?CMP=share_btn_url

Margaret Connolly talks about her sister, the president-elect

A reader sent this to the blog.

Up to now I hadn’t seen any religious/spiritual reference in any of Catherine Connolly’s pronouncements. Good to see her sister making a very valid point. Connolly’s sister hits back at ‘awful smears’ against the president-elect.

ELLA SLOANE is a journalist at The Irish Times.

Catherine Connolly’s sister has spoken out against the “awful smears that were thrown against” the president-elect during her campaign.

Speaking on local radio station Ocean FM yesterday, Sligo-based GP Margaret Connolly described her sister’s election win as “historic, beautiful, and a dream come true”.

“One million people have endorsed the truth,” she said, referencing the landslide victory which saw Ms Connolly receive more than 914,000 votes – 63.3 per cent of the total valid poll.

Expressing pride in her older sister’s achievement, Ms Connolly said she was glad people were not “frightened by lies and such awful smears that were thrown against” the Independent candidate.

“If she’s a commie and a loony, I am very glad to be in her camp,” said Ms Connolly, “I am proud that Catherine will speak the truth.”

One of 14 children, seven boys and seven girls, the president-elect grew up in Shantalla, in one of the biggest council estates in Galway city at the time.

Her mother died in 1966 aged 43, when Catherine was nine years old.

Perseverance

“She was three years older than me when our mum died,” said Ms Connolly, who is one of two sisters now living in Sligo.

Their father, a carpenter and later a building contractor, brought the children up, with the help of his eldest daughters. At the time of their mother’s death, the oldest sibling was 21 and the youngest a toddler of one.

“Perseverance, love and compassion” were some of the core values “hard bred into our DNA by our mother and father”, Ms Connolly told Ocean FM’s Niall Delaney. These, she said, are Christian values, and ones which she believes will define her sister’s presidency.

“Jesus was probably the first socialist,” she added.

On Saturday night, Catherine Connolly vowed to be “a president for all” during her victory speech at Dublin Castle.

“I think absolutely she will rise to be a president for all,” said her sister.

Last year, Margaret Connolly married her long-term partner, then-mayor of Sligo, councillor Declan Bree, in a historic ceremony at City Hall in Sligo.

The wedding was the first at the venue since it was built in 1865.

Speaking of his sister-in-law’s win on Saturday, Mr Bree praised her Sligo-based sisters, saying they “didn’t leave a stone unturned” in their campaigning.

Ms Connolly won 63.46 per cent of the Sligo-Leitrim vote.

Mr Bree said that Ms Connolly’s election “marks the start of a movement for an alternative Ireland”.

It takes a woman to speak truth to power

This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Michael Commane

It’s a challenging exercise to prepare wise words to speak at Mass on Sundays. The Gospel reading in the Catholic liturgy on Sunday October 19 was the story of the crooked judge who would not listen to the poor widow. (St Luke 18: 1 - 8) She kept pestering him until she converted him to do what was right. 

Many of the commentators suggest the story is about the need for prayer, and it is that too. The first paragraph reads: ‘Jesus told his disciples a story about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary.’ But on many readings of the Gospel I became fascinated with the idea that it took a woman to convert the judge; and not just any woman but a poor widow, who had nothing. In modern parlance this surely was truth speaking to power.

My mother died in the Meath Hospital in 1988. My father and I were contacted early in the morning and when we arrived she was dead. 

While I was standing at her bedside a priest, all dressed in black, muttered some unintelligible words. When he saw me crying, said: ‘get a hold of yourself’. Some minutes later a woman on cleaning duty offered my father and me a glass of water. 

On Sunday, October 19 I was cycling to celebrate Mass with a group of women, who have hit on hard times. With about four kilometres to cycle I suddenly felt the air was fizzling out of my back tyre, yes, I had a puncture. Panic set in. 

I did not want to leave the bicycle on the side of the road as the lock I had was of poor quality. I eventually found a teaching establishment, where I thought I could leave my electric bicycle. The security man with his high vis and dangling lanyard said I could park the bicycle up against the wall. He would not hear of putting it away in a safe place. 

I got talking to a woman, who works in the catering department at the institution. She calmed me and told me she’d go talk to the security man but she got nowhere with him. Eventually she suggested I remove the battery and she would keep it safe for me. She was so nice and helpful. 

I made it on time for Mass with the women. After the Gospel I spoke about the power of women and the influence they can have in the world.  I asked if men held the dominant position simply because of their physical strength. I think we agreed that that was an interesting possibility. Isn’t it true to say that the people in control decide the programme, write the script?

Listening to Limerick sportswoman Jackie McCarthy O’Brien on Thursday on RTÉ’s Oliver Callan I was ashamed of being a man and a priest. Well done Jackie. 

Her mother was a single mother, who came home to Ireland with her new daughter. They were living with her mother’s father. One day two gardaí and a priest came knocking and took Jackie away to an industrial school, where she spent many years. And that was Ireland as late as the 1960s.

It’s all in her new book, ‘We Made It, Kid’.