HeyJaredBreda O'Brien
- Indexed articles, last 90 days
- 11
- Latest publication
- Sep 27, 2026
- Outlet visibility, for Irish Times
- Top 5K sites
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest articles
Breda O'Brien: Itâs hard not to have sympathy for Lena Dunham. But thereâs a darker side to surrogacy (opens the original)
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Lena Dunham, creator and star of the HBO series Girls, announced in Vogue last week that a surrogate mother had given birth to a daughter for her and her Peruvian-British musician husband, Luis Felber. She describes sitting between the surrogate motherâs legs as the baby was delivered, which, for some, sounded a bit too close to Margaret Atwoodâs The Handmaidâs Tale, where Janine, the handmaid Ofwarren, gives birth positioned between the legs of Commander Warrenâs Wife. Nonetheless, amon
Breda O'Brien: Rollout of the reformed Leaving Cert should be suspended (opens the original)
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Given the Irish obsession with the Leaving Certificate, it is surprising how little attention the radical reform now under way is attracting. Perhaps the resignation of two respected academics from the maths reform committee will prompt people to wake up. Aoibhinn Nà Shúilleabháin, DCU associate professor of mathematics education and Pauline Mellon, professor emeritus in the UCD School of Mathematics and Statistics, did not resign lightly. Neither could stand over the draft maths syllabus. Bo
Breda O'Brien: âCommunity careâ is exposed as an empty concept when a carer dies (opens the original)
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Care in the community for people with intellectual disabilities is allegedly the gold standard. The hollowness of this concept is shown every time a parent or other primary carer dies. This wholly predictable event is treated as a shocking surprise and immediately categorised as an emergency. For-profit companies, whose definition of community is somewhat elastic, are generally the only ones with the capacity to respond. The bereaved individual with disabilities is often placed far from home, lo
Families who end up in court are unhappy in strikingly similar ways (opens the original)
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Tolstoy was wrong. The opening line of Anna Karenina declares: âHappy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.â Carol Coulterâs first volume of 103 anonymised case reports from the Family Law Reporting Project suggests the opposite: the families who end up in court are unhappy in strikingly similar ways. The case reports from these private family law proceedings are separate to the continuing childcare law reports from the Child Law Project she started in 2012. Th
Are we a nation of flaming hypocrites? (opens the original)
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There has been a 30 per cent drop in Catholic baptism figures over the last 10 years. It seems obvious that there should be a similarly huge drop in support for Catholic patronage of primary schools. Yet that is not the case. An Irish Times analysis of the Department of Educationâs survey on patronage showed support for change was strongest in certain predictable areas like Dublin, Cork and Wicklow. Even then, support for changing from Catholic patronage was not as high as might be expected. I
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