Ask not what your elected reps can do for you…

Posted on February 20, 2017 by Department of Speculation

Ten sleeps till election day in Norn Iron and I’m losing little over my decision to sit this one out. The only backlash I feared was my Mother’s threat of a clip round the ear for refusing to exercise a privilege for which many fought hard. She didn’t disappoint. So indelible are the stains of struggle on the ballot box that any attempt to ignore them is construed as casually ducking out of the generational relay race of responsibility. Point taken. As a woman (allegedly), the perceived betrayal induces an uncompromising wrath.

Clipped tones and appendages aside, I welcomed an opportunity for my decision to be given a good kicking. It’s still standing, if slightly hunched over with a black eye. Kneecaps intact though (my best feature).

“A penalty for not participating in politics is to be governed by your inferiors.”

That punch thrown by Plato, delivered through those given power of attorney over Earth – Twitter users.

It’s doubtful Plato had a pre-determined Assembly structure designed to safeguard the Green/Orange configuration in mind when he uttered that assertion. Were he around now, he might be tempted to add: “unless you live in Northern Ireland, where an out-dated parliamentary configuration ensures inferior governance for all”. For we are not dealing with a regular democracy, if such a system ever existed in the first place.

But you already knew that. And that is precisely why it is imperative that my fellow citizens and I in this septic statelet must ensure peace is protected at all costs! By casting our vote! Peace must hold! Or we’ll bring it down! That would be the same peace brokered twenty years ago when the IRA graciously laid down their arms following periods of intransigence and indifference from politicians North, South and Westminster. The same peace under mythical threat if the precious ‘centre’ is pulled out from under it.

“Ok-so how did the people effect the ushering in of peace? Surely influence on the IRA & 2 governments = politics. Democracy means voting.”

I wouldn’t like to underestimate the commitment and sacrifices made by politicians, nor can I indulge in the mawkish glorification of them in recent years. No-one is better at congratulating Sinn Fein than Sinn Fein. It conveniently obscures the people’s demands for ‘no more’, which triggered the threat of political expediency that eventually backed all shades into a corner with no option but to negotiate a way out. Ordinary people’s movements tend not to make it into official history books, nor into revisonist views of it.

“They brought us here well esp John Hume in 1998. Early problems aside-Trimble dancing re Drumcree the 2017”

“They” being the nationalist SDLP and Ulster Unionist parties, respectively. The current pact both are pushing the electorate to support as a ‘radical’ alternative to the deteriorating marriage of Sinn Fein and DUP. The latter workable only because one side’s constituency was not under threat by vote-hunters from the other; and ultimately unworkable because the Party First Mentality resulted in treating the livelihood of the broad electorate with wilful contempt.

The whatboutery of the SF/DUP breakdown is for other hair-splitters to rant about. In some ways, it has everything and nothing to do with my opting out. Blind a fresh Troubles-free young generation with a dam-burst of bitterness about the past, then force them to referee their petulant elders. Arrogantly lean on an increasingly diverse collection of greying heads to lead by example. Force them to compromise their personal and moral convictions to prop up those incapable of doing the same. Ideals inconsistent with two church-deferring anti-choice parties with a lethargic attitude to integrated education. The balance of responsibilities has tipped further back onto the lap of an electorate expected to do most of the heavy lifting.

Others have attracted consternation for canvassing on “single issues” with some commentators deeming it “selfish”. As if issues of poverty, education, welfare reform, equality, the environment, health, reproductive rights and so on bear no relationship to each other, they are dismissed by the compulsion to protect the ragbag of Orange and Green ‘cultural’ sensitivities. Hasn’t that been the problem? A faulty formula meant for a short-term period of political transition, which, 20 years on, is an instrument for the abuse and suffocation of integration. The pressure to balance the needs of all (with no consensus on what that is) with personal integrity is unrealistic. It would not be unlike asking pro-choice activists to vote Fianna Fail and Fine Gael to prevent them from huffing with each other. An ostensibly mellower Assembly might appear reachable from here, but it won’t usher any radical challenge to the status quo. The structure is set-up to safeguard it.

If you believe the ballot box is as sacred as it always was, your irritation with those leaving it to the pall-bearing few to carry is understandable.

“Nobody counts “didn’t vote” or “spoiled vote”. The notion that non/spoiled votes are effective protest is wrong.”

But I don’t claim my not-arsedness as a protest move, not in the respectable definition of the term. All things considered and chin-stroked over, I couldn’t vote for any of the candidates on offer in my area. Moreover, the ballot box is not the sacred, exclusive means of engaging in political action it once was. As an apparatus of democracy it is at best constrained, and at worst illusionary. Pissed on. Neither is it the only method to register dissent or participate in politics. You probably noticed that, too.

So, rightly or wrongly, I’m bowing out of the ballot box on this occasion. Not as an act of protest, or civil ‘disobedience’, but as a right. Politics is a broad term. Day-to-day community life is where it’s at for me. The ordinary people in Norn Iron have always been ahead of state politics, anyway. When it mattered most.

march

A legitimate protest, hi

Children of the revolution

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Department of Speculation

“Participants in last week’s pro-choice march hang signs around children’s necks proclaiming, “I was a chosen child.” The implications are chilling. “Chosen” has surface connotations of being special, but also the cold wind whispering in your ear: you could have just as easily not been chosen. Your siblings, your flesh and blood, may not have been chosen and therefore are absent forever from your life. Such a slogan screams that adults are all-powerful. They have the right to exclude others from even being defined as human.”

Breda O’Brien, Irish Times Sat 1/10/16

I wondered when the subject of children on protest marches would arise. More specifically, the subjective value-judgements commentators inevitably attach to it. Breda might’ve been left cold by the perceived connotations of the gesture, as is her wont; I just thought it was extraordinarily naff. But I’m sure she’d expect nothing less from an irresponsible pro-choicer like myself who brought her own daughter on the march last year.

She continues…

“Children cannot rationalise abortion in the way adults can. They cannot rationalise taking away a life as a solution.”

As statements of fact, the first will likely be met with broad agreement by anyone who has ever spent a few minutes of their lifetime dabbling in logic. The second will prompt many to ask for clarifications on the meaning of life, whether that includes the life of a sentient woman, the solution to what exactly, and other plentiful well-worn question marks frequently posed by my 4 year-old and her mates over play-doh.

Breda’s contention is not that children shouldn’t be brought on marches – she brought her own on pro-life rallies – it’s that pro-choice marches are essentially an exercise in compromising the emotional security of those children attending. Where the use of such slogans as ‘chosen child’ is an unequivocal demonstration of how their mother’s love is conditional, and there but for the almighty power of her (presumably) blithe judgement, their own lives might very well have been taken away before they began.

Tell me about it, Breda. Sure our wee one has been milking that one for years, and will continue to do so until it dawns on her around 13 that she didn’t actually ask to be born.

“No parent loves perfectly, but babies bring out a fierce protectiveness in us. The urge to protect the weakest and most helpless is primal. Or at least it used to be.”

Or at least it is for us pro-life parents, in short. As a pro-life protesting parent, Breda is satisfied with the phased exposure to the principles of the pro-life movement undertaken with her own children. Pro-life protestors, it would seem, have a monopoly on ensuring responsible engagement of children in forms of protest.

“I told them that abortion was a word that they had to trust me to worry about and not to explain until they were much older. “

I’m not sure I feel so confident. When it comes to protecting the innocence of my own girl, and balancing that with the cultivation of a sense of justice and an incremental introduction to the complexities and messiness of life, there is much I won’t be able to guard her from. But such is life.

In time, she will come to learn there are few areas in life that can be unequivocally defined by a single moral perspective. That those holding competing views will always be the last to see their own hypocrisy. And, just as Breda marches alongside children brandishing placards showing foetal remains; the rest of us take our place next to our own diversity of bedfellows and march onward in the hope of reaching a fair destination.

For now, I’m reasonably certain that instilling an awareness of the existence of public disgruntlement, unhappiness among women about the rules that govern them, and their corresponding entitlement to use the public highway to highlight that, will not compromise our girl’s sense of security. She’s been doing it effectively in the hallway since the time she could walk.

children-marching

What do we want?

Our mothers to be trusted

When do we want it?

Er can we have our crisps now?

Rose of Tralee: Are we missing the point?

Posted on August 20, 2016 by Department of Speculation

“The annual Rose of Tralee brings with it a slew of disdainful articles, all predictable and totally missing the point! ”

Well, there you have it. A comment in response to today’s Journal.ie’s opinion piece on that most divisive of pageants: The Rose of Tralee. Joining Lorraine Courtney in the condemnation corner is Louise O’Neill in The Examiner. Both allude to the anachronistic nature of the event: the casual objectification of women (albeit without the bikini round); the ethnically homogenous participants; and the less-than-subtle assumptions on sexuality with the safeguarding of an exclusively male line-up of chaperones. Because, in the case of the latter, where would the ladies be without one? Getting sick sideways out the tour-bus window no doubt. If only.

Like any cultural phenomenon, the spectacle shouldn’t be spared a periodic good kicking to see how it stands up. Courtney is concerned with the perceived dumbing down of personalities through the banal interview that forces participants to temper their individuality via self-censorship and insipid responses. O’Neill, meanwhile, despairs that regardless of the purported elevation of brains above beauty to ensure a more respectable affair, it is the sparkly dresses and winning smiles that little girls looking on remember. The impact of the resulting absorption of such messages on female success should not be underestimated.

Like any article written on women by women, neither writer is spared the reciprocated on-line kicking. The substantive points both make are frequently overlooked by readers more concerned with pointing out their apparent uptightness and compulsion to peddle a pro-feminist message. Imagine that. The particularly enlightened commentators cite several points missed: the choice women have to participate (or not), the ‘harmlessness’ of the revenue-generating bit of fun local communities depend on, and not least the professional and educational status of the wimmin. What’s all the whinging for?

“Some of the most accomplished women have taken part in the Rose of the Tralee and last years winner is a medical student and as a cancer survivor will I believe, go on to be a fine doctor.” (sic)

Indeed. And this is perhaps what makes it a uniquely Irish Festival of Respectability: the degree and the big job. The ultimate status symbols. That most beloved of combos after low-esteem and big ego. Which to this reluctant spectator, is what has helped contributed to the event’s durability.

Louise O’Neill asks when the last time a woman of colour entered? While this is a fair question, so dominated has identity politics become by issues of gender and sexuality that the most glaring issue of inequality that encompasses many women irrespective of ethnicity appears to go unchallenged: that of class. When is the last time a woman without the mandatory third level education and impenetrable job title entered?

“Of course no mention that the majority of these women are all ready successful in there lives much more successful then the women that complain and want to stop them from doing this.”

Another Journal commentator roundly telling the critics off.

There is just one thorny problem with that analysis however: people are born with conventional beauty (or pay for it), but it is privilege that awards them ‘brains’. In the common Irish sense. The Rose of Tralee sense. The status and respectability sense. The national middle-class definition of success sense.

The centrality of women’s education in combating global inequality and access to the labour market is a given. Ambition and determination are not to be sniffed at either. But they are not the preserve of the formally educated who have benefitted from the opportunity to have their ‘brains’ nurtured. A degree and companion ‘profession’ isn’t a pre-requisite for contributing to keeping society successfully on its axis, nor an accurate measure of ‘intelligence’; and the meaning of ‘success’ goes beyond what’s reflected back at us from our job titles and pay-cheques.

When I watch the conga of lovely girls sashaying on to the stage, it is not exposure to identikit glamour and bad jokes I fear most for my own girl. It is the stark class divisions and national obsession with defining success according to a system of inequality that leaves the bitterest after-taste. The narrow definition of success. The one-track route to worthiness. Will the unconscious absorption of the message on ‘success’ stalk her throughout her life? In choosing to go to college or not. In adjusting aspirations and priorities if children enter the fray (if she wants them, and lucky to have them). If they don’t, will she be shunted into that limiting corner where her worth must proved by workplace success? Will jettisoning the big job and opportunities result in itchy feelings of failure? Will having the benefit of a formal education (if lucky to receive it) for life and knowledge be sufficient?

Modern mainstream musings on women are freighted with these anxieties, and written mostly by ‘successful’ women. Valid though they be, they have, in the main, become an issue of entitlement for the already entitled. With scant attention given to equality of access to education, and the merits of it remaining the chief determinant for just about every ‘respectable’ job going. And we don’t need to re-open any discussion here on the lack of respect afforded to predominantly female areas of work.

Even if it were to leave out ‘beauty’, The Rose of Tralee would still be left with the worrying problem of ‘brains’. So why bother with either?

rose of tralee

You’ve No degree? What kind of degree is that? Begorrah

Lorraine Courtney’s article: http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/rose-of-tralee-outdated-lorraine-courtney-2935105-Aug2016/

Louise O’Neill’s article: http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/columnists/louise-oneill/to-be-a-rose-was-to-have-made-it-in-life-416879.html

Una Mullally, sexual consent classes, and dissent

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Department of Speculation

I’m not on Twitter, but my fella is; so I’m obliged to annoyingly look over his shoulder occasionally to sneer at something. Anything.

I spotted this gem earlier from some bloke re-tweeted by Róisín Ingle:

“any1 justifying why they don’t need to attend a sexual consent workshop NEEDS to go 2 1 ASAP”

An obvious reference to the dissent greeting Una Mullally’s piece in the Irish Times’ today instructing readers on why we need “a solid framework of education around sex and consent”, which apparently amounts to compulsory sexual consent classes due to be introduced for freshers to Trinity in the coming year.

Mullally makes no reference to proven models of good practice that exist within youth work provision; the comparatively higher success in exploring these issues at a younger age in a non-formal educational setting in which young people are facilitated to explore the responsibilities that come with sexual development along with their peers rather than top-down instruction; and the on-going cuts to the sector that attack this vital function.

Instead, the reader is treated to a blunt defence of the approach, and a neat comparison of these classes with the similarly necessary imposition of breathalyser tests, and other put-’em-up tactics designed to undermine the legitimacy of any chin-stroking or reservations about the move. The limits to the elasticity of consent in the context of debate are seemingly off-limits. And that might well be the most annoying sentence I’ve ever written, but let me not interrupt my own righteousness any further…

The problem with reserving the right to reflect on the issues a little longer than the length of an opinion column and its umpteen curled lips, is that one is obliged to share question marks with strange bedfellows. By strange, I mean bonkers, as a cursory read of the regular commentariat below the line of columns on the Irish Times website will confirm.

Similarly, the problem with having a left-leaning feminist outlook is that that broad value system is shared with what appears to be an increasingly bug-bite ridden band of bed-fellows intent on knocking themselves (and the validity of their own argument) out with spectacular feats of intolerance. Shutting down the need for all ideas to be given a good kicking appears very much at odds with their own philosophy.

The quality of the debate is one thing, but the rush to paralyse it with such thoughtful and insightful comments as the tweet above is further evidence that elements of both the Bonkers and the Left are becoming indistinguishable. Or as my new best friends over at the Irish Times’ comments section would put it – what a load of shite.

For a more rounded, open-ended, view on the issue that treats the reader as an adult, have a read at Fionola Meredith’s take from the same paper. Or as my new best enemies over at the Irish Times’ comment section would put it – what a load of shite.

And your Ma smells of wee.

Remembering… Mary Raftery

Posted on January 31, 2016 by Department of Speculation

“The Church thinks in centuries, do you think your paper has the resources to take that on?”

Stanley Tucci’s pithy lawyer puts it up to Mark Ruffalo’s investigative reporter early on in Spotlight, the deft dramatisation of The Boston Globe’s incendiary exposure of the systemic cover-up of widespread child abuse by the clerical elite. For decades. Sound familiar?

Hollywood thinks in blockbusters, but did it have the resources to take it on? Whatever about the availability of budgets, its success is due in no small part to an experienced cast willing to resist any scenery-chewing righteousness. The ever reliable Ruffalo captures the tenacity and flightiness of a truth vigilante on the verge of something big; but it takes Michael Keaton’s restrained editor to reign him in, having at one time been too eager to get over the finish-line himself. There’s big. But there’s bigger.

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one”

Sound familiar? The axis of blind eyes and indifference kept on turning. Tucci can be trusted to deliver another unequivocal truth.

The audience of the Dublin cinema I’m in knows where the conclusion is headed. As does the rest of the Western world familiar with the story of Vatican corruption. Despite the multitude of spoiler alerts revealed over recent years, a reminder can still leave them sitting silent until the last of the credits roll. After the written updates on what happened next disappear; and the flashing lists of destinations revealed as locations where clerical child abuse investigations have taken place.

Ferns, Ireland. Gortahork, Ireland. And the rest. Counties are an irrelevancy.

RTÉ deals in small investigative departments, but did it have the resources to take it on? It had Mary Raftery.

“Mary was best known for her 1999 ground-breaking “States of Fear” documentaries. They revealed the extent of abuse suffered by children in Irish industrial schools and institutions managed by religious orders. It led to taoiseach Bertie Ahern apologising on behalf of the state.

Her work also led to the setting up of the Ryan Commission, which reported in May 2009, and to the setting up of a confidential committee which heard the stories of victims of institutional abuse.

Speaking about her findings to the BBC in 2009, Mary Raftery said: “There was widespread sexual abuse, particularly in the boys’ institutions.

“Extremely vicious and sadistic physical abuse, way off the scale, and horrific emotional abuse, designed to break the children.

“We had people talk to us about hearing screams… the screams of children in the night coming from these buildings and really not knowing what to do.

“They didn’t know to whom they could complain because the power in the town was the religious order running the institution.”

Following the documentaries, the government set up the Residential Institutions Redress Board which has compensated about 14,000 people” Source: The BBC

mary raftery

Mary Raftery

Spotlight is a reminder of the power of Mary Raftery’s investigative journalism, and her fearless tenacity that served the village truth in the face of wilful blindness. In an era in which RTÉ doesn’t appear to be over-endowed with such resources, her contribution, and premature death, still has the power to pin the viewer to the seat for just a few seconds more.

A triumph

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Department of Speculation

Of parenting publishing banality. Bravo.

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/banish-daddy-guilt-10-tips-for-frazzled-working-fathers-1.2489957

The Irish paradox

Posted on October 11, 2015 by Department of Speculation

Writing it and doing all your research, because there’s a lot of research in it…what did you learn? What was the biggest learning, or was it stuff you just had confirmed for you, or were there insights that made you go “wow, I’ve learned that now, that’s a new thing”?

I suppose there was a lot of things I was hoping to learn and I was pleased to learn that we are actually very kind. ‘Cause I was hoping we were very kind; and we are. I think probably the most disturbing thing actually is going back to racism again because it did mention most ethnic groups, and Muslims. But Travellers…there’s a fella, a sociologist called Michael MacGreil, who wrote a book in the ‘70s called ‘Prejudice & Tolerance in Ireland’, and that’s been his career – studying into that on an on-going basis. And in his studies, a quarter of Irish people, the settled community, would deny citizenship to Travellers. It’s as profound as that. If you think about it, most people in the settled community don’t want a Traveller living anywhere near them, they don’t want to work with one, they wouldn’t want their kids to marry one. Well, what’s the difference between any of that and apartheid, say? It’s essentially an apartheid state for them. Now, that’s not to say the Traveller community doesn’t have a massive problem with criminality and not getting how to interact with the settled community…. But, they are a community in crisis, I think. I think modernity was a complete disaster for them and they don’t really know how to deal with it. And no-one’s really helped them, and there’s been virtually no attempt made to understand them or indeed for them to understand us. That conversation hasn’t happened.

And do you think that’s something that you might campaign about on your programme or in other ways? Is it something that you kind of got interested in since doing that research?

It is. We’ve done one or two things on it before. Again, though, it’s one of those things that you have to cut your cloth to a degree because…. …. We’ve had Michael Collins on, the Travellers rights spokesman, and, of course, every time he comes on, the abuse is unbelievable. Yeah, so, it’s like you almost have to find a way to present this to people to say “well, this is actually good for you, and it’s good for your communities if we have this conversation”

******************************

An excerpt from an interview by Roisin Ingle with broadcaster, Sean Moncrieff, on his new book.

Full interview available here: https://soundcloud.com/irishtimes-lifestyle/sean-moncrieff

Did you read Róisín yet?

Posted on September 20, 2015 by Department of Speculation

A common mate call among pairs of mothers and daughters echoed along our national phone network on any given weekend. An Ireland-shaped matrix of relationships that leads them to find in her columns those common touchstones on the pitfalls and playfulness of life. A recurring item on the agenda for the weekly weekend catch-up. Invariably, it reminds one of the other, or of themselves together. Distilling what they’ve been “saying all along” into ways they’ve never heard put, or possibly as compassionately or honestly, before.

As a bridge between generations, my Mother and I have been tip tapping back and forth over her columns to each other for years. Plucking out similar calamities and falls from social grace for a duet of laughter. And letting a few seconds of silence speak for themselves when it comes to more fatal falls of the heart and good intentions. As an interpreter of the hard stuff between generations of the same blood, Róisín’s been doing it pro bono for as long as I can remember.

Last week was no different.

“Did you read Róisín yet?”

It’s rare for both of us to be on the same page. The other is always just on the brink of sitting down to do so. And there’s her crossword and Sudoku addictions to attend to first.

Last week was no different.

“I’m just about to sit down. But I heard her on Marian. That took some guts”

“It did, yeah”

But last week was different. Instead of waiting till the next call for her to catch up, I felt an unpremeditated urge to keep going.

“Ma?”

“Yeah?”

The few seconds of silence steeled us both.

“What is it?”

“I had an abortion, too, Ma. I just never found the right time to tell you”

Her sigh of relief audible.

“Well, isn’t it lovely that it was Róisín who helped you to tell me?”

A woman who has been giving us both permission to talk as women for years . The significance was not lost on either of us.

The Mommy Wars: other voices

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Department of Speculation

When I flick through various newspaper supplements, lifestyle magazines (ugh whatever the hell lifestyle is), or scroll down the latest quasi-guru infested websites, there seems to be no shortage of articles and commentary on the challenges of motherhood. On the face of it, this might appear a progressive trend only the most churlish would curl a lip at, but look closer and they read as postcards from a few select parenting resorts. Common though they may be among many.

When we talk about motherhood and work in these various spaces, it is often to the absence of voices of working class women being included. Despite hopes that this would change with the advent of cheaper access to the net, and a broader understanding of ‘balance’ and responsibility newsmakers surely have for contributing towards an equilibrium of comment with all the attendant tensions that would bring, it hasn’t. If anything, it has gotten worse.

There are too many trend stories about middle and upper middle class women and their dilemmas in the workforce/home dominating the waves. The validity of their experiences, and the right to unpick them both individually and collectively, is a given. But to many, and across much of the media, it cements a disturbingly singular narrative and the face of modern parenting in the Irish workplace. And this is worrying for everyone.

I don’t believe ordinary middle class and upper middle class women intentionally seek to exclude the experiences of working class women, or single mothers, or mothers from minority communities; but the narrow parameters around pat concepts we accuse the media of lazily drumming up, clearly do.

We’re all familiar with the routine by now. The mainstream “mommy wars” pits two homogeneous groups of women from broadly similar backgrounds against each other. The complexities of balancing workplace struggles, retaining personal identity, sanity, and a sense self-worth against childcare options, are reduced to notions of ‘choice’. Combined with boiled down statistics from a proliferation of (often dubious) studies conducted exclusively with a cohort of women from ‘professional’ sectors, all nuance is lost. Respecting personal choice as a response is all the rage. Add in negative equity and crippling childcare costs, and the cheap argument is rounded out into one that is null and void, where we all essentially just get along and support one another.

Buried below all of this, are the experiences of swathes of mothers who are unemployed for other reasons, or who work in the retail, caring, and catering sectors struggling to put together a living wage. The challenges they face in securing and paying for proper childcare are immense. It’s up there with securing sustainable work. And making the subsistence pay stretch. Low-income leads to poor physical health, poor mental health, inadequate diet, risky consumer choices, lack of opportunities to broaden progression routes within the training and work-force, and all the other by-products of poverty that don’t need spelling out here. The mainstream Mommy Wars excludes this narrative. The Mommy Wars exclude the need for everyone to push together, not just on the need for mutual respect, but for economic justice for other mothers. For fair wages. What might appear as a media-manufactured instrument of a fictional war, creates another barrier for those further down the line to battle against. Limiting responses to the Mommy Wars with proof of camaraderie among middle class women inadvertently drowns out those voices who are not.

In the main, mothers from every background are contending with busy lives and juggling a multitude of tasks to keep themselves and their family on the straight and narrow. They have enough to do. But it is unfortunate, that in on-line discussions concerning child and family nutrition, and other parental “choices”, the frequency with which choices of others are ridiculed, and certain women shamed, is becoming ever more apparent. Even from those who in another breath lament the existence of the phoney mommy wars while calling for respect and understanding.

The sugar industry preys on the paltry wages of poor mothers and works in an insidious way. And while breastfeeding might currently be the preserve of “educated” women, the self-satisfaction often accompanying the reporting of one’s commitment to it, while politely wagging fingers at those who do not, is at best futile. More than that, these discussions characterise the Mommy Wars of a particularly ugly kind. One in which those whose actions being challenged don’t have recourse to comment. Not in on-line fora, not on parental website articles, and certainly not in the national press.

Education brings with it a number of responsibilities as well as advantages. Continuing to educate ourselves on the experiences of everyone is surely one that comes with learned territory. We’re sophisticated enough to engage with the issues of all women.

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