I first discovered fear when I was about eleven years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I’d had the usual childhood in which I was frightened by scary stories at bedtime, imagined monsters under the bed and once a particularly thrilling piece in Enid Blyton’s Five go to Finniston Farm. The scene which scared the pants off me was a mysterious face at the window at night. Truth be told, that idea can still give me the willies. And as a codicil, that particular expression, the give one the willies, comes from the Willow tree, often associated with sadness, graveyards and fear. There, I never knew that either until I wrote that line and had to go and google it, for it looked so strange on paper. But true fear happened when my younger brother and I visited family friends one summer. The other family were holidaying about an hour outside of Dublin and my parents were invited to visit for the day. The other family had a boy who was a year or two older than me, and he had a number of covert magazines. These magazines, he had purchased with his own money, were hidden under his mattress but […]
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Debt Becomes Her
At the end of last year, as the debate over our national indebtedness continues, there was a horrific story that hit the headlines: A professional Irish man who had lost his job and was currently unemployed, was struggling to pay his mortgage. And in struggling to pay his mortgage, he was neglecting to feed his children. The story grew even more terrible as it transpired he found his daughter in her bedroom chewing on cardboard from a cereal packet to stave off the hunger. This story is frightening from so many perspectives that it is hard to know where to begin. One really scary point is that it is being told in modern Ireland. This was not, when I last looked, a Third World country with no infrastructure, no police force, and no welfare state. This is a country that recently entertained the Queen and the President of the United States of America. We spent millions on security, on entertainment, on promoting the visits but they went without hitch and even with a fair degree of pride. In terms of keeping up with the Joneses, we were right up there. Is feider linn we all repeated after the O’Bama from […]
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