Mary KennyA pleasant young man was handing out leaflets last Sunday, outside St Teresa’s Church in Clarendon Street, Dublin, calling on people to ‘Stand Against Media Bias’ at a protest outside Dáil Éireann this week.
The slogan is “33 to 1” – because, in the space of a recent fortnight, 33 articles appeared in the national papers “pushing hard” for more abortion – as against only one article that took the pro-life side.
The young people featured in the leaflets are all bright and attractive, and it is right that young people should be featured in this campaign, which is more relevant to those in their fertile years.
And if the national media is so prejudiced – by a measure of 33 to 1 – against the pro-life point of view embraced by young people like these, then they are surely not acting in their own best interest.
Believe me, the obsessive and abiding worry in the newspaper industry, in Ireland and elsewhere, is the great difficulty in getting younger people to read papers at all.
You don’t have to commission a marketing survey to find the evidence. You just have to sit on a bus or a train and see what the young are reading.
Their iPhones. Their tablets. Sometimes books and magazines. But hardly ever daily national newspapers. We in the trade of journalism are desperately keen to attract the younger generation to the satisfaction of reading a real newspaper, not just a ‘link’ online.
What the young in the pro-life movements should do is approach the editors and managements of national newspapers and point out that there are intelligent and vibrant young people who would appreciate a more balanced view in the newspapers – and that it makes economic sense to reflect that balanced view. Genuine diversity and real plurality is incompatible with a ratio of 33-1.
The Irish Independent (for which I write) has a very commendable advertising slogan: “Before you make up your mind – open it.” Quite so!
Nothing like a day at the races
I would love to be in Cheltenham this week to enjoy this fabulous racing event, but you can’t have everything you want in this world, and that’s that!
Yet Edna O’Brien once said to me, in connection with romance among the elderly: “I may not be able to climb Mount Errigal, but I can still admire it.”
So I may not be able to be at Cheltenham, but I can still take pleasure in the joy and drama of the occasion. For me, the horse race is about two things: the beautiful equine creature – the horse – and the fascinating human personalities involved.
But I especially like hearing about the champion Ulster-born jockey A.P. McCoy (pictured), to whom Cheltenham is this week dedicated, as he now retires, aged 40.
Whatever successes they attain, the outlook of the professional jockey strikes me as refreshingly unpretentious. I’ve watched Queen Elizabeth talk to jockeys in the parade paddock before a race, and without any airs and graces between either of them: they are not focused on themselves, but on the horse and the sport itself, for its own sake.
I dare say the world of the turf is as liable to human flaws and corruption as any other and yet it often strikes me that the lack of narcissism in this world is bracingly wholesome. Their talk is so constructive, so focused on something other than themselves.
Tony McCoy is, by all accounts, much liked for his grit and dedication, and has also been called “the kindest man you could meet”. May his shadow never grow less.
Creating family ambiguity
The famous Greek tragedy of Oedipus has served not only drama, but psychoanalysis, for some time now. Oedipus inadvertently slays his father and marries his mother, and a terrible transgression thus occurs.
It is hard not to think of Oedipus in learning about Kyle Casson and the birth of his baby son, Miles, borne by Kyle’s own mother via a Sheffield fertility clinic. Kyle is a gay man who has always wanted a child, and when searching for a surrogate, his own mother, Anne-Marie, stepped forward.
An egg donor was found for Kyle’s sperm, and the resulting embryo was implanted in his mother’s womb, and a pregnancy confirmed.
Thus was little Miles born, and Kyle says everyone is thrilled, and the family is closer than ever.
Close indeed: baby Miles’s father is also his brother, and his birth mother also his grandmother.
There always have been some ambiguous situations in family life – the actor Jack Nicolson believed his grandmother was his mother – but these were attempts to manage a situation which had arisen through a human slip. In future we will have many more deliberately created situations of confusing family ambiguity, prompted by a booming surrogacy trade, and the claim that everyone has the right to have a child.