It has been a super couple of days for the Irish Olympians in Paris. Gold for Rhys McClenaghan on the pommel horse yesterday; gold for Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy in rowing on Friday; a semi-final victory for boxer Kellie Harrington. It was a week also where a new generation of Irish swimmers emphatically announced themselves on the world’s biggest stage. Daniel Wiffen backed up his understated confidence with a spectacular gold medal in the 800m (and is favoured to take the win in the 1,500 final this evening). In the women’s 100m breaststroke final, Mona McSharry put in a brilliant swim to secure bronze. She took the medal by the the narrowest of margins, just 0.01 seconds ahead of both Italy’s Benedetta Pilato and the USA’s Lilly King. “Dreams do come true,” she said afterwards.
As Ian O’Riordan writes, Ireland and its Olympic swimmers are losing the tag of the island nation that struggles in the water. But back at home and, in an extraordinarily cruel twist of timing, Irish swimming’s darkest hour returned to cast a shadow over the bright and brilliant present. You could almost forget there was ever a time when the words “Irish swimming” didn’t evoke joy and unity and celebration, but shame and a seemingly unrelenting catalogue of horrors, writes Jennifer O’Connell. She is speaking, of course, about Derry O’Rourke, former swimming coach and convicted child rapist, who was sentenced during the week to 10 years for the rape of a girl he had coached in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
How, O’Connell asks, must O’Rourke’s victims feel, watching McSharry and Wiffen generate such joy and pride doing something that these women once loved? How does it feel knowing it might even, in another life, have been them?
Away from the Olympics, it’s good to know that chess is cool now, helped, in part, by the publication next month of Sally Rooney’s chess-themed new novel Intermezzo, which tells of Ivan, a 22-year-old competitive player. Niamh Donnelly writes that Trinity College Dublin chess society sign-ups have been steadily increasing over the past three years. The growth of online streaming communities as well as new rapid-play styles have large appeal among a new generation of young chess enthusiasts, Donnelly discovers in her Magazine cover article this weekend.
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David McWilliams is more focused on social pools than swimming pools this weekend and is reminded of a question a friend’s south Dublin mum asked him when he visited their house in the 1980s. In a one-stop effort to rank the unfamiliar young lad, on hearing his name, she goes: “Is that McWilliams the legal family?” Today, amid global turmoil, the standard patterns of social mobility are shifting, he writes. And career choices are being recalibrated as financial and other rewards rise and fall.
How have you been watching the Olympics? Online, on TV, on your smartphone or tablet? It brings us to the question of the Government’s recent and much-maligned €725 million funding plan for RTÉ. Hugh Linehan agrees that the time for talking about a public-service broadcaster is over. We need instead to talk about public-service content, wherever it happens to be produced.
In our books Q&A, author Charlotte Mendelson tells us about her new novel, Wife. It’s about how love can become a disaster: the story of Zoe, a young shy academic who meets, then moves in, with the older, glamorous Penny. Their relationship, from the outside, looks perfect, even enviable: after all, everyone wants a wife. But there are already rumbles of distant thunder, early seeds of destruction.
Is the US Republican Party weird? Democrats seem to think so. Weird appears to be the word of choice they use to describe the campaign team of Donald Trump and JD Vance. It seems to have struck a nerve with the Grand Old Party. Donald Clarke explains why: It has become easy to forget the core Republican vote remains, in theory, those who pride themselves on sticking to the American normal. The Republican strategy has, since the 1960s, had much to do with defending the hard-working interior from decadent, drug-crazed weirdos on either coast.
And in her column this weekend, Roe McDermott responds to a reader who says she often consents to sex with her husband not because she wants to have sex but because she thinks she should. “My husband never pressures me but there’s just this idea that healthy marriages involve frequent sex, so I do it. Some of the time I’m glad I did it, but other times I just feel empty,” she writes.
In this week’s On the Money newsletter, Dominic Coyle talks about inheritance tax and how the rules might change in the budget. Sign up here to receive the newsletter straight to your inbox every Friday.
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