Sandra Harris Writes

  A TOXIC CULTURE IN FOOTBALL: A WOMAN SPEAKS OUT. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Okay, okay, I’m not a man. I don’t have a willy and balls, I have the other thing. But I’m the mother of a young man, so I think that might just give me the right to talk about one of the things normally seen as a mostly male preserve: football. Yes, in the past couple of years, women’s football has suddenly become a big thing and women are gaining recognition left, right and centre for it and other sports. There are female pundits on the television now and I think even women referees in actual football games where men are playing. Fair play to them all, especially the referees, because that would be scary, being the only woman on a field full of angry, sweaty men all barging into one another while you're trying to make note of who’s fouling whom, but don’t tell me that men don’t secretly still consider football to be their own personal stronghold and that ‘birds’ have no place in it. I’ve talked befor...

LIFE LESSONS FROM LOVE ISLAND, or, THE JOEY ESSEX EFFECT. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Oh God, I love LOVE ISLAND. I love watching it, discussing it with my kids afterwards, thinking about it when I go to bed and then going on Twitter when I wake up to see what the millions of fans thought about the previous night’s episode. It’s not even my guilty pleasure any more; I’m quite open about that the fact that I practically live for it during the months of June and July.  We’ve reached the halfway mark in the show and it’s making me reflect on the morals and ethics (and carnal forebearance?) of some of the contestants. Well, one of the contestants in particular, a tanned, muscular thirty-three-year-old bloke called Joey Essex. Sound familiar? That’s because he is familiar. He’s been a reality television star since 2011, when he appeared on popular television show, THE ONLY WAY IS ESSEX. Since then, he’s been on pretty much every reality television show except THE X FACTOR . He has his o...

  This is the transcript of a letter I sent to the Irish Times newspaper on 21/06/2024. A LETTER TO THE EDITOR: SUSPENDED SENTENCE FOR SOLDIER WHO VICIOUSLY ASSAULTED YOUNG LIMERICK WOMAN. Dear Editor, I am disgusted and appalled at the ridiculously lenient ‘sentence’ handed down to soldier Cathal Crotty this week by Judge Tom O’Donnell. In May 2022, Crotty severely battered Natasha O’Brien on a Limerick street because she attempted to stop him shouting homophobic slurs at fellow passers-by. ‘Two to put her down, two more to put her out,’ Crotty boasted  on social media  after the attack. This is not a man, this is a despicable coward and bully. What happened to Zero Tolerance of violence against women? What is the point of Gardai and government ministers urging women to ‘come forward’ and report their rapes and incidents of domestic violence or street violence at the hands of men if the men then get off scot-free? What kind of deterrent is that? What message does i...

  IT COMES TO US ALL… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I recently discovered that a man I knew slightly but really liked and was looking forward to getting to know better- we’ll call him Dave- had died, just two days after I last saw him. I did that thing that pretty much everyone does when they hear that someone they know has died. I said to the person imparting the news: Oh, but how can he be gone? I’d only just seen him and talked to him two days earlier…! As if that could somehow make someone immune from death. I was stunned at the news and really, really sad at the loss to the world of such a decent, gentle kind-hearted soul, someone who adored animals and wildlife, music and poetry (he’d written countless poems himself) and chatting to people and having a laugh. He’d been cut down in his prime as well, having not even reached his fiftieth birthday. I’ll say it again, it just made me so sad, thinking about how he might have had plans left undone and wishes and dreams left unfulfill...

  DUBLIN CALLING… MUSINGS ON EUROVISION 2024. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Jiminy Jellikers! This year’s Eurovision Song Contest was the most exciting in years, for a myriad of mad- and sad- reasons. My kids and I were completely wiped out with exhaustion by the end of Saturday night, after four of the most intense hours of television so far this year, and that’s not even taking into account all the shenanigans and news accounts and rumours we were all keeping track off in the run-up to the contest. Would the contest ban Israel from performing because of the war in Gaza? Would Israel pull out themselves, after all the bad vibes and hostility from protestors who made their presence known in Malmo in the days before the world’s biggest singing competition was due to take place? Would Israel’s act be booed on the night, or would pro-Palestinian activists rush the stage armed with red paint and smoke bombs? In the end, the Israeli act, the song HURRICANE , performed powerfully by a gor...

  ON KEEPING A DIARY. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © People have been keeping diaries since the dawn of time, every since the first caveman chiselled a likeness of the first woolly mammoth onto a nice blank chunk of cave wall. It’s human nature to want to record things, to want to say I was here and yes, I mattered, I had an effect on things, I was somehow important.   I’ve taken to reading other people’s diaries a lot lately, by which I mean people’s published diaries. No, I haven’t been rootling through the coats and bags of friends and family and reading their secrets, haha, interesting as that might be. I read published diaries out of curiosity, to see what folks’ lives were like back in the day, what people thought about, what mattered to them and whether the same things matter to us now, whether we liked or disliked the same things and so on. Diaries are often the main or even the only way we have of finding out what a particular period in history was really like. Take all the diar...

I’M NOT A HOARDER, DEAR; I’M A COLLECTOR…! BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I’ve been watching a load of programmes about hoarders on YouTube lately, purely in the interests of research, you understand, and not just because I’m procrastinating and putting off writing things. I found the programmes wholly fascinating, anyway, and I wanted to share some of my observations with you and see what you thought. Firstly, it’s kind of like car crash TV, isn’t it? What you’re looking at is truly awful and disturbing, but you can’t look away. What’s more, you don’t want to look away, because what you’re watching is so compulsive. Addictive, even. I could no more skip or miss the outcome of a particular hoarding show than I could eat a banana without gagging at the squishy brown bits. Also, if you’re in any way inclined to hold onto too much shit yourself (books, ahem, my own personal downfall! Oh, and Victorian dolls…) , these shows make you feel better about your own hoarding habits. I never know if ...