Sandra Harris Writes

  THE GENDER RECOGNITION ACT: TEN YEARS ON. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © On the fifteenth of July, 2015, the Irish Oireachtas passed the Gender Recognition Act. This meant that any adult in Ireland who wished to legally change gender could do so simply by filling out a form. I had a small child at the time and didn’t spend hours watching news and following the activities of government via the Oireachtas television channel as I do nowadays, but surely I couldn’t have missed something so important, an act of government which would impact all women’s lives in so significant a fashion? Anyone you ask about it will tell you that this was one of those ‘under the radar’ laws that didn’t receive a huge amount of debate on television. ‘Under the radar…?’ Why would it have been ‘under the radar?’ And why were the people whom it would ultimately impact the most- women- not asked their opinion in a country-wide referendum? Were we asked and I’d missed it, maybe, caught up as I was in motherho...

LIVE AID: FORTY YEARS ON. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s been described as a ‘musical moon landing.’ It was certainly the defining musical moment for my generation, the way that, I don’t know, the Oasis reunion is probably the one for my son’s generation. Even then though, of course Live Aid was much bigger. Nothing before or since has ever come even remotely close. So, what was it exactly? Well, it was a pop-and-rock concert for famine relief in Africa, and it was the brainchild of Bob Geldof, former frontman of the Boomtown Rats. It was held in Wembley Stadium in London on the thirteenth of July, 1985, with a parallel concert taking place in JFK Stadium in Philadelphia on the same day. It was shown in one hundred and fifty countries round the world, some of which were holding their own obviously much smaller Live Aid concerts, and it was watched by an estimated 1.9 billion people, a good forty percent of the world’s population. Those are crazy numbers, lads. Over seventy artists ...

  HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, AMERICA!  BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Ah, the Fourth of July! It’s a day to celebrate all things American, and my own personal way of commemorating it is to watch a typically American fillum or read something by an American author. This year, I went to see a screening of INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), one of the most American movies ever made, in a local library. It’s the story of an extra-terrestrial attack on the land of the free and the home of the brave in the run-up to the Fourth of July, culminating on the Big Day itself, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to be able to see it on the big screen, as the smaller one doesn’t really do it justice. The scenes showing the massive spaceship are extra-impressive on the big screen. I brought my adult son along to enjoy it with me, but he wandered off to the toilet early on and missed some of the best scenes in the whole thing: the gigantic spaceship casting an ominous shadow over various American landmark...