Dublin Old School Quotes

Childhood Interrupted, Kathleen O’Malley By Rachel Hopkins | Tuesday 23rd January 2007 | 185 comments ★★★★☆ In this terrifyingly true story, set in the 1950’s, Kathleen O’Malley relives her disrupted childhood, in which she was seized from the confines of her home and forced to work in an Industrial School run by the Sisters of Mercy. Kathleen and her sisters were forced to leave home after Kathleen became the victim of a brutal sexual assault at eight years old. Her mother was found guilty of negligence and Kathleen and her two sisters became just three of thousands of Dublin’s ‘orphans’, who were physically and emotionally abused, stripped of their dignity and humiliated with beatings. This story is not one of self-pity and resentment that is so often found in books of this nature but is one of survival and success; despite this horrendous experience, the author tells of her escape to England in a desperate search for a better life and now confronts her hidden past in a beautifully written journey through her childhood, which is bound to captivate your imagination and draw you in to the daily terrors that greeted the O’Malley sisters. Impossible to put down, this book is a truly remarkable story and certainly well worth a read. publisher: virago price: £10.99

Despite an icy northeast wind huffing across the bay I sneak out after dark, after my mother falls asleep clutching her leather Bible, and I hike up the rutted road to the frosted meadow to stand in mist, my shoes in muck, and toss my echo against the moss-covered fieldstone corners of the burned-out church where Sunday nights in summer for years Father Thomas, that mad handsome priest, would gather us girls in the basement to dye the rose cotton linen cut-outs that the deacon’s daughter, a thin beauty with short white hair and long trim nails, would stitch by hand each folded edge then steam-iron flat so full of starch, stiffening fabric petals, which we silly Sunday school girls curled with quick sharp pulls of a scissor blade, forming clusters of curved petals the younger children assembled with Krazy glue and fuzzy green wire, sometimes adding tissue paper leaves, all of us gladly laboring like factory workers rather than have to color with crayon stubs the robe of Christ again, Christ with his empty hands inviting us to dine, Christ with a shepherd's staff signaling to another flock of puffy lambs, or naked Christ with a drooping head crowned with blackened thorns, and Lord how we laughed later when we went door to door in groups, visiting the old parishioners, the sick and bittersweet, all the near dead, and we dropped our bikes on the perfect lawns of dull neighbors, agnostics we suspected, hawking our handmade linen roses for a donation, bragging how each petal was hand-cut from a pattern drawn by Father Thomas himself, that mad handsome priest, who personally told the Monsignor to go fornicate himself, saying he was a disgruntled altar boy calling home from a phone booth outside a pub in North Dublin, while I sat half-dressed, sniffing incense, giddy and drunk with sacrament wine stains on my panties, whispering my oath of unholy love while wiggling uncomfortably on the mad priest's lap, but God he was beautiful with a fine chiseled chin and perfect teeth and a smile that would melt the Madonna, and God he was kind with a slow gentle touch, never harsh or too quick, and Christ how that crafty devil could draw, imitate a rose petal in perfect outline, his sharp pencil slanted just so, the tip barely touching so that he could sketch and drink, and cough without jerking, without ruining the work, or tearing the tissue paper, thin as a membrane, which like a clean skin arrived fresh each Saturday delivered by the dry cleaners, tucked into the crisp black vestment, wrapped around shirt cardboard, pinned to protect the high collar.

There is an expression in Ottawa that every member of Parliament believes they should be in cabinet and every member of cabinet thinks they should be prime minister. The exception is any member of Parliament from Newfoundland. They go to bed at night thinking they should be ambassador to Ireland. What a job it would be, lying around the fancy house in Dublin, representing the not very pressing interests of Canada in the land of your forefathers. The spare bedroom in the house would be filled with a steady stream of relatives and old high school buddies hell-bent on having a party and finding out where their great-grandparents are buried. The best Newfoundland musicians would be at the embassy, hobnobbing with their fiddle-playing Irish counterparts. The kitchen parties would be epic. Mother Ireland. The Emerald Isle. The Land of Saints and Scholars. She's easy on the eyes and hard on the liver.

In the year 2000, a young scientist named Paul Kenny moved from Dublin to San Diego to continue his neuroscientific research. He noticed something pretty quickly. In the main, Americans don’t eat like Irish people. They eat more, and they consume more sugars and fats in particular. Paul was thrown at first, but he soon assimilated—and within two years, he had gained thirty pounds. “I was like—oh my Lord, what is going on?” he told me. He rose to become the chair of the Department of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, and on the way, he grew curious about something. Did this different American diet change your brain? Once you start to eat in this way—lots of processed, fatty, sugary foods—might it be harder to stop? With his colleagues, he designed an experiment to test this. They raised a group of lab rats, and fed them nothing but pre-prepared rat chow. “It’s healthy. It’s balanced,” Paul said—the lab rat equivalent of what my father grew up eating. When this was all they had, the rats would eat until they were full, and then their natural instincts would kick in, and they would stop. They never became obese. Then he introduced the rats to the hyper-American diet. He bought some cheesecake and Snickers bars, and fried up some bacon. He split the rats into two groups. The first group was given access to the junkiest American food for one hour a day. The second group was given access to it almost all day. Both groups also, at the same time, had access to as much of the healthy rat chow as they wanted. You might call these cages Cheesecake Park—a place where the rats got to eat just like us. Paul watched as the rats sniffed the cheesecake and the Snickers and the bacon, and they began to eat. And eat. And eat. The rats who only had an hour with the cheesecake would “dip their head into it” the moment it arrived “and munch all the way through” until it was totally gone, Paul said. “The head would be slick with cheesecake. They’d gorge themselves,” and emerge “smothered in cheesecake.” The rats who had access to it all the time would eat even more, and they consumed it differently. They would eat some, leave it for a little while, then come back and eat some more. They were frequently topping up with sugar and fat. For both groups, as soon as they had the American diet, they lost interest in the healthy old rat chow. They shunned it. It bored them. The rats who got cheesecake for an hour a day would get just a third of their calories from the rat chow. The rats who had cheesecake all the time got just 5 percent of their calories from ordinary rat chow. They lost their ability to control their eating. Their old instincts, which kept them healthy, stopped working. They simply gorged.