A wise nun gave Mary Kenny the best ever tip – always rise above slights and insults
As we convent-school girls faced our summer exeat, Mother Margaret Mary assembled us for a purposeful talk.
Would this be a dark warning against the devil’s snares or the ‘occasions of sin’ that might tempt nubile teenagers?
‘Girls,’ the nun began, ‘when you start out on your working lives, my abiding advice is this: don’t be a touchy person.
‘Don’t look for slights and insults from others. Don’t take offence too quickly, or be oversensitive about trivialities. If people
are unpleasant, just laugh it off! Don’t take someone’s bad mood or bad manners to heart. You will be much happier if you have a balanced attitude
to tiffs and differences. Be resilient, and show your mettle by your character.’
Would such counsel pass muster today, when ‘injury to feelings’ can be a profitable source of litigation? When any ‘protected characteristic’, from gender to emotional fragility, can be grounds for ‘hurt or distress’ brought to an employment tribunal?
Rather than laughing off unpleasantness, would it be shrewder to suggest suing for compensation when someone’s offended?
A pinnacle was reached this summer when a woman executive claimed that being included in the collective term ‘lads’ constituted ‘sex harassment’, and implied ‘unwanted conduct’ and ‘casual use of gender- specific language’.
The tribunal judge agreed that, under the 2010 Equality Act, any woman called a ‘lad’ could feel unacceptably patronised and insulted.
Was our generation wrong to try keeping a calm exterior if banter went too far, ignoring perceived insults?
I’m torn between Mother Margaret Mary’s common sense – and rueful thoughts about the compo I might have pursued if hurt feelings had been recognised in our time.
The Central Bank of Ireland has issued a silver €15 commemorative coin to honour George Bernard Shaw, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature a century ago, in 1925.
GBS, born in 1856, was a Dublin Protestant who became an atheist,vegetarian and anti-vaxxer – opposing vaccinations long before the current vogue. He was a mixture of the altruistic, the sensible, the naïve and the idiotic. He was an admirable campaigner for public toilets, in an age when the subject was considered indelicate. But he was also a supporter of the odious theory of eugenics, which considered some people – the short- sighted – unfit to breed. He avoided breeding himself by having an unconsummated – yet happy – marriage to his wife, Charlotte.
Despite being ‘anti-sentimentality’, he had a sense of family loyalty. He gave a fine theatre to the Irish town of Carlow, because his mother hailed from that county, and it has remained funded by GBS’s legacy ever since.
But he was completely taken in by the Soviet Union, calling it ‘a land of hope’, and described Stalin as ‘a Georgian gentleman’.
Ireland has honoured GBS with several awards, and the small Irish navy has named one of its principal patrol vessels the George Bernard Shaw. Ironically, it may be deployed to fend off prowling Russian ships around the Atlantic shores.
The €15 (£12.78) commemorative coin, designed by Antonella Napolione, costs €65 (£55.40) to buy. Socialist GBS always did say capitalism was a swizz!
Embarking on a bedroom decluttering, I noted that I was in possession of more than 80 lipsticks, which is surely excessive.
Yet a lipstick is a lovely cosmetic, and, according to Leonard Lauder (1933- 2025), the recently deceased beauty mogul, the carmine stick plays a key role in understanding economics. When women can’t afford big luxuries, they console themselves with small ones – such as another new lipstick.
He also enhanced his lipstick sales by changing the rounded tip to a more convenient slanted shape. By such innovative thinking, Mr Lauder became a great art collector and philanthropist.
I once interviewed his mother, Estée Lauder, who founded the business. She seemed friendly and practical, and a proud Jewish mother of her son Leonard.
I happened to be in New York in 1970. So I telephoned her office, explaining that I was a young journalist from Dublin and asking if could I have an interview with Madam Lauder.
‘Sure,’ came the response. It was duly arranged without fuss, no security checks and no PR supervision.
My strongest memory is of the astonishing openness – and trust – of American society at that time.
We call them ‘traffickers’, or ‘people- smugglers’ – the operators who ferry those small, illegal dinghies almost daily to Dover beach. The French call them passeurs.
Previously, the word passeur was associated with mountain guides who brought Allied airmen, and others fleeing the Nazis, over the Pyrenees from occupied France to Spain. The Basque Florentino Goikoetxea, who guided more than 200 Allied airmen to safety, was a famous passeur.
‘Trafficker’ is a pejorative term, while a passeur was a helpful guide. Such are the nuances of language.
