Fergus Finlay and social inequality

The former Labour advisor (for advisor read 'spinmeister') Fergus Finlay is now the head of Barnardos, he also has a weekly column in the Irish Examiner, in which he pontificates on various topics, while generally managing to avoid the usual cliches that Irish columnists fall into. Here's the one he had last Tuesday. Election promises, who needs em, eh?!

(As an aside, there's truly nothing better than spendin your day off listening to the radio and drinking tea while it's raining outside...)

Required Reading

There are very few newspaper columns that I actively look forward to reading. My least favourite columns are those based on personal experience and the writers own day to day life. So surprise surprise, my two favourite weekly columns do exactly that. Michael Harding in The Irish Times features pages on a Friday, has, for a number of months now, managed to maintain an astonishingly high standard of writing. His columns leave me contemplating life in a way that very little writing in any genre has an ability to do. Unfortunately, the majority of the Irish Times website is subscription (including Harding's columns), so I can't link to them here.

The second column is perhaps even more surprising. Its one I stumbled across by chance - it's buried in the Family section of The Guardian on a Saturday, and it details the life of the mother of three teenagers. It manages to be reflective, humorous, and scarily accurate, all within the space of four or so paragraphs. Here's the most recent column:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2250686,00.html