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Showing posts from June, 2018

Nope to the Pope or A Nod to God?

Pope Francis In case you've been living under a rock and starved of wi-fi for the past couple of months, you'll be aware that the Pope is coming to Ireland this summer. He'll be hosting a big summer bash known as the World Meeting of the Families (except the single-parent families or the gay ones, of course). This culminates in a very, very big mass in Dublin's Phoenix Park on Sunday August 26th. The last time a Pope said mass in the Phoenix Park, there were over million people in attendance. This mass has been the source of scandal over the past number of days which I will explain presently. Tickets are available for free through this site . The catchy and instantly-hashtaggable 'Say Nope to the Pope' campaign took off in recent days. To be honest, calling it a 'campaign' would be giving it an air of legitimacy which I believe it does not merit, so lets be real. It's a  Facebook event  set up encouraging people to claim free tickets with no

The 'C' Word: We Need To Speak About Sexual Education

"Over the coming years, your bodies will be changing." It was 2012, in an uncomfortable primary school classroom. This was it: the day that everyone had been anticipating for years. We heard whispers of what to expect from siblings over the weeks prior. We were nervous, anxious and very giddy. We were getting 'The Talk' . For those not from Ireland, 'The Talk' is the colloquial expression for the introduction sexual education class that primary school students receive at around the age of 12. It's an afternoon in which the girls go red as beetroots at the mention of menstruation and the lads hide their smirks and giggles with their jumpers when shown diagrams of the male anatomy. Unfortunately in my case and in the case of my classmates our introduction to sex education was the practically the extent of our sexual education. There's a reason that it's labelled 'the' talk, in the singular, I suppose. Over the 6 years following, we had p