Sandra Harris Writes

  VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN IRELAND… WHEN WILL IT END? BY SANDRA HARRIS. © About three weeks ago, a beautiful young school teacher called Aisling Murphy was brutally murdered in Tullamore, while going for a run in the afternoon. It was broad daylight. A man came out of nowhere and strangled her. She was in her early twenties, loved her job as a primary school teacher (and the kids loved her) and was well liked in her community, not to mention loved by her family and boyfriend. She loved playing her traditional music at festivals with her fellow musicians. She seemed like a good, decent person who would have gone on to achieve worthwhile things and contribute something to the world. Last weekend in Cork, a woman was hit in the face and head and left with a broken jaw while walking home alone late at night. A boy of thirteen has been identified as a person of interest in the case. I don’t even know where to begin talking about what’s wrong with this sentence, except to ask th...

                      NEVER MIND VIOLENCE IN FOOTBALL, WHAT ABOUT VIOLENT FOOTBALLERS? BY SANDRA HARRIS. © ‘My teenage son, who's also autistic, adores Premier League football and the Champions League as well. Understandably for someone as young and impressionable, these men are his heroes, his idols. But more and more of them are getting in trouble for the rape and battery of women. Just today, one of his favourite Manchester United players is on the front pages of the newspapers for rape and assault. I'll tell you something for nothing, it's getting very hard to teach a boy of today to respect women and never be violent to them when the men who should be his examples and role models behave the way they do.’ Above is a post I put up on Facebook yesterday morning after it was made known that Man. Utd forward Mason Greenwood had been arrested by the English police for the alleged rape and assault of a woman. A lot of the comments...

  AMANDA KNOX. (2016) A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY BY ROD BLACKHURST AND BRIAN MCGINN. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © The murder of Meredith Kercher happened in 2007. The sensational and extensive news coverage largely passed me by at the time because I was a new mammy of a baby boy with special needs, otherwise I probably would have been all over that like everyone else. Murder, sex, intrigue, mystery, blood- what’s not to get excited about, as English journalist Nick Pisa who covered the case says in the film, though personally I think this guy was a little too over-enthusiastic about getting his juicy sex-murder headlines. The press jumped on this case like a swarm of hungry wolves. The headlines became more and more lurid, with the journalists leaping on wild murmurings about devil worshipping, cult murder and kinky sex. According to this documentary, the truth is a lot less fantastical and, sadly, more mundane, if you can use the word ‘mundane’ in connection with the death of a lovely, v...