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![]() Áilín QuinlanEvening Echo |
THE lady in the snappy purple boots sighed. She was dreading the drive back to North Cork, she said. We were standing, shivering, in a long queue...
WHEN the Minister for Transport is spending his time making the burning of turf a hanging offence, badgering rural dwellers without easy access to...
HERE’S the ironic thing about Ireland. This Land of Saints and Scholars has - rightly - welcomed thousands of war-refugees and asylum-seekers of all...
IS it just me or does this word suddenly seem to be popping up everywhere? Someone complained to me about a difficult and unpleasant relative....
ARE we proud of ourselves now? Ten times a day we assault a nurse in our hospitals. Our misogyny, impatience, rage and sense of entitlement has...
‘TO bite off more than you can chew’. It’s a familiar aphorism, but in the interests of accuracy, I ran a quick check with the Collins English...
SO here’s the thing. The little people never win. I’m not talking about leprechauns or pots of gold under rainbows, because there never are any...
“LOOK,” the man said, “it’s over, there’s no point going on about it. New year, new start, look ahead and march on. “Enjoy the crocuses....
ONE morning more than 100 years ago, a young man called Johnny Fortune mounted his penny-farthing bicycle on a Dublin street and set off to visit his...
“THE party’s on, the feeling’s here, that only comes one time a year,” sang Paul McCartney as I stood in front of the rack of Christmas cards,...
IT’S not just the camaraderie of the other women laughing around me, their wet hair streaming with sea-water as they towel themselves down; it’s...
IT’S an undeniable truth that we all tend to see things through our own, rather narrow lens, but sometimes life treats you to the odd flash of...
I WAS frantically looking for birthday presents for a man who doesn’t want anything. I’m sure you know this sort of male. Over the years, a...
SO, here we are. At last. An Irish report. Real-time Irish-based research into the domestic experience of Long Covid by the renowned APC Microbiome...
WAS it being racist, the old woman inquired, to say that she thought the Ukrainian Ambassador had been downright ungrateful? Complaining that a group...
AMIDST the outrage, the disapproval, the condemnation, a threatened police investigation, some fulsome apologising and the serious “talking...
SHE was unremarkable-looking; an American tourist. It was her voice, and more specifically, what she was saying that left me standing with my mouth...
“WOULD it be preferable,” I eventually inquired in chilly tones, “to just wash the dishes, the laundry and myself in the stream below?” The...
WHEN a friend of mine, a bird-sized lady in her sixties, mentioned she was planning to travel alone by train to Dublin from Cork and back again –...
WELL, now, I have to say, Gráinne Seoige has a point. We don’t talk about menopause nearly enough. Lots of newspaper articles are written about it...
MY immediate thought was: now there’s the birthday present of birthday presents for the serious child who loves dinosaurs and has everything...
WHEN I was small, I used to stay with my grandparents quite often in a bustling little town on the east coast. Maybe it was on a Friday, but it could...
WE’RE on holiday. It’s beautifully warm and sunny. I have just laid out a lovely picnic salad lunch on the wooden table on the patio and gone back...
HIS theory, the man said, was that Ireland was set to become the most popular residential destination in the world. It was all about the climate,...