Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
For non-Catholics, the most luridly fascinating aspect of Catholicism is confession. Telling your inmost sins — and we know what they are — to a male cleric, eh? In a darkened booth. How medieval is that? Well, the fantasies that people who never go to confession nurse about it are about to be shored up
As a child, I was not a good traveller. The mere scent of a car interior – possibly the plastic seats, maybe the closed atmosphere, probably the whiff of petrol – would be enough to bring on the tell-tale flow of odd saliva that heralded a really impressive bout of vomiting. If the smell of fag
Interesting, isn’t it, this rather worrying statement from the Muslim body, MQI UK on the Mohammed cartoon affair. That, you recall, began when a member of a BBC TV audience showed a cartoon image from a series called Jesus and Mo on his T-shirt depicting, er, Mohammed and Jesus. Nothing remotely offensive but a full-face depiction
Well, whatever about the French press, for British papers, the Hollande affair is the gift that keeps on giving. Apparently shored up in the presidential residence in Versailles, Valerie Trierweiler was, it seems, visited by the president on Thursday night, though the visit does not seem to have clarified her situation. It is said that
Obviously, the whole Hollande business is utterly compelling from a prurient point of view, though journalists did brilliantly in coming up with spurious public interest reasons for talking about it (Corsican mafia! Presidential security! Lying!). The most riveting aspect, for me, is the heroic restraint of his former partner Ségolène Royale when she was asked
There was a lovely little ultrasound picture of a foetus to illustrate the Independent’s splash today about the incidence of sex-selective abortions in Britain. According to the paper’s analysis of ONS statistics, the incidence of second daughters among immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh and possibly those from other countries such as India isn’t quite the
The EU commission office in London was kind enough to send me this, a warmup for a ‘town-hall style meeting’ on the part of the Vice-President of the Commission, Viviane Reding, though I’m not entirely sure that the Royal Institution is quite your normal town hall. Anyway, something of the spirit of the open primary has
So, what are you doing with your Christmas decorations? Still up? Did the tree get put out on 2 January? Maybe you’re holding out until the Twelfth Day, on the basis that it’s bad luck to have the decorations up after that? Or are you going out on a limb and keeping your holly, bay
Paul Collier is an Oxford economist specialising in the poorest African economies, and the striking thing about his important book on migration, Exodus, is that his focus is largely on the effects on the countries the migrants leave behind. We’re so self-obsessed when it comes to the issue that we forget that emigration may not be in the
There has been a stagey sort of surprise at the news that Nigel Farage has called for refugees from the conflict in Syria to be given asylum in Britain. He’s anti-immigration, see, so his call for generous provision for refugees of war has, at least for our major broadcasters, a paradoxical element. But it doesn’t
Tristram Hunt, Shadow Education Secretary, is an intelligent and articulate individual but like everyone in politics, has the handicap of having to square his views with the record and policies of his own party. His interesting interview with the Fabian Review is a case in point. He attributes some of the education failures of white
The prospects for peace on earth to men of goodwill – the original Christmas present — look a little slim right now, so by way of compensation, here’s a perfectly fabulous recipe for something to go with your Christmas pudding. It’s Mrs Hanrahan’s Sauce from Darina Allen’s A Simply Delicious Christmas. And frankly, it’s so
In the Kensington M&S where I get my lunch – the delicatessen has a very decent pork pie or Scotch egg – the business of queuing is a matter for snap judgments…if there’s an empty till going with a human being on it (do I need to say why automated tills are a pain?) then you
Must say, I felt a bit defensive when I looked at the tables of origin for immigrants to Britain for the decades to 2011, helpfully set out in The Daily Mail. The real gist of the thing was the numbers – an increase from just under 2 million in the decade to 1951 to 7.5
David Davis is plainly right that the Tories are just testing the water to see how talk about capping child benefit to two children for people on the dole goes down with the punters. And the predictable result is that the water isn’t really all that cold. The suggestion has gone down nicely with quite
Rod Liddle’s observation about the death of Nelson Mandela, cut off, alas, at the age of 95, hardly needs supplementing but I was struck by one aspect of the blanket coverage, viz, its quasi-religious character. The Mirror, the day after the sad event, observed that Mr Mandela was as near as we get in this
It’s no joke, having a Caesarean, and I’ve had two. So the news that Essex County Council social services obliged a pregnant, mentally ill Italian woman to have her baby in this fashion – normally, you talk the thing over with a consultant – was perhaps the scariest element of the case when I first
Just over half a million people migrated to the UK in the year to June. And half a million the year before – actually, it was 517,000, but let’s not quibble. A million, then, in two years…that’s quite something. But you wouldn’t have known from the news about the new immigration stats from the Home Office, which
Animal stories for children are always tricky; as J.R.R. Tolkien observed in his essay on fairy stories, you can end up, as in The Wind in the Willows, with an animal mask on human form. Watership Down has been described as a nice story about a group of English public schoolboys with occasional rabbit features.
It was a curious coincidence, don’t you think, that the sexual conduct findings that the Lancet published today coincided with the publication of a report from the Deputy Children’s Commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, about child-on-child sexual violence? The two stories were juxtaposed uncomfortably in the news. In the case of the Lancet survey, which is conducted
