What drives a mother to kill?

This is the cover story I wrote for the Irish Independent's Weekend magazine of September 4 last. Hard to report on, but not half as harrowing as being a relative of any of the parties involved in these cases.


MOST parents’ idea of a nightmare would be to outlive their children. No wonder then that when a child dies at the hands of a parent, it provokes outrage and disbelief. When that parent is a mother, it seems the most heinous act of all: a mockery of the primal human instinct of maternal love.

No-one knows if these were Ruth Murphy’s final thoughts a fortnight ago when she tied two plastic bags around her head and slowly suffocated to death on the floor of her cell in the Dochas women’s prison in Mountjoy. Murphy was serving a life sentence for murdering her seven-year-old son Karl in June 2001. Karl too had spent his last moments struggling for precious gasps of air, his head held firmly under water at Greystones beach by his mother as she drowned him.

Although she was found crying and incoherent on the shore near where Karl’s body lay in shallow water, Ruth Murphy did not admit killing him until shortly before her trial was to begin in 2004. It would have been very difficult to explain away the six dark fingermarks on his neck which proved the lie to her original story that he had accidentally drowned. The traumatic nature of his death, and his mother’s part in it, shocked the nation.

“There’s nothing in our culture, our literature, our day-to-day experience that would suggest that women are more dangerous than men where children are concerned so when you have a situation where a woman harms a child, it’s bound to come as a terrible shock,” says Fergus Finlay, CEO of children’s charity Barnardos.

Ruth Murphy had been an alcoholic and was estranged from Karl’s father, who had custody of their son. She was attending a psychiatrist, was drinking heavily and was on anti-anxiety drugs when she snatched Karl during one of her court-restricted visits to him at the home of a couple who babysat him in Glenealy, Co Wicklow. She drove him to Greystones beach and – in an act so poignantly in contrast to what was to follow - gave him sandwiches, Coke and crisps shortly before she ended his life.

In her seven years in jail, Murphy never explained why she had killed her son although her alcoholism and fragile mental state clearly played a part. As she didn’t leave a suicide note, neither will her family ever know exactly why she put an end to her own life. Dochas staff say that she had been in the grip of a depressive phase in the weeks before she died – but had she also reached a point at which she could no longer live with what she had done?

The incomprehensible nature of maternal filicide – mothers who kill their own children – is perhaps the hardest cross to bear for those left behind. Eddie Reddy, whose sister Sharon Grace drowned herself and her two little daughters on Kaat’s Strand in Co Wexford in April 2005, says his family will never know if anything could have been done to prevent her desperate actions.



“That question will always be there,” Eddie told Weekend. “Who knows? You can’t get hung up on the question or it will eat away at you. It happened, you can’t change the past, the only thing you can change is the future.”

Sharon had become depressed after separating from her husband Barry, father to Mikhala, four, and Abby, three, the previous Christmas. On the evening of the tragedy, she had called to Ely Hospital in Wexford, pleading to speak with a social worker. She was told there was nobody to speak with her and no out-of-hours emergency number she could call. The three bodies of Sharon and her little girls were found floating in three feet of water on Kaat’s Strand the following morning. She left behind an 11-year-old daughter Amy from a previous relationship, who is now in the care of Sharon’s sister Lillian.

“As far as I know, the situation (regarding the provision of out-of-hours social services) hasn’t changed,” says Eddie. He is now 29, the same age Sharon was when she died. “The way I look at things is that the country had loads and loads of money and it didn’t invest in mental health back then. They’re not going to do it now there is no money.”

Eddie has instead channelled his grief into fundraising for the suicide charity Console. He dedicated a 160km sponsored cycle last January to his lost sister and nieces, and organises other fundraising events through the website www.sharongracememorial.com. His efforts have helped Console to set up a drop-in suicide awareness and prevention centre, Console House, in Wexford town.

“It’s always inside of you, but you have to let it go and try to get some good to come from something that was so bad,” says Eddie. “It was such a high-profile case that it would be terrible to let it go without trying to get some good out of it.”
He says that he and his family can’t afford to live in the past: “You can only change what’s in front of you”. He does, however, think that recognising and speaking about what might seem an unspeakable act is a way forward in preventing further murder-suicides like his sister’s.

“Five years ago, it wasn’t talked about. People have become more open, realised that people have problems and they need to talk to each other. Problems you have in your head can seem so big, and to share it with others could make you think it’s not so big after all. It’s hard going but all you can do is learn from the past.”

As in the case of Sharon Grace, many mothers who kill their children frequently take their own lives too. This, of course, makes it impossible to question their motivation in the aftermath. There are a few tragedies that quickly emerge to be the direct result of severe psychiatric illnesses. Forensic psychologist Dr Brian McCaffrey testified at the 2002 murder trial of Jacqueline Costello, who strangled and suffocated her eight-year-old son Robert in 2000 at their home in Mullinavat, Co Kilkenny. She had been released that very morning from Waterford General Hospital where she had been treated for depression.

Dr McCaffrey says: “In the Costello case, she was schizophrenic, she definitely had a psychotic illness.” He told her murder trial that he believed her schizophrenia was misdiagnosed as post-natal depression. Jacqueline’s mother had also been a schizophrenic and Jacqueline had previously raised her concerns about the mental health legacy she had inherited. She was found guilty but insane of Robert’s murder.

The Costello trial judge Mr Justice Paul Butler criticised the criminal insanity law which allowed a mentally ill person to be branded guilty as “not only grotesque but obscene”. The law changed in 2006 to create the new verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity – and 47-year-old psychiatrist Lynn Hutchinson became the second person ever to be returned this verdict after she drowned her 16-year-old daughter Ciara Gibbs in a bathtub.

That tragedy made headline news: here was a highly educated woman who had raised her academic, beautiful daughter and younger son in a loving, stable home with her husband Gerard Gibbs, a fellow psychiatrist.

The day of the tragedy, Lynn and Ciara had gone shopping in Dublin while her son and husband were visiting family overnight. That evening, back home in Kilkenny after their day trip, Lynn Hutchinson ended her daughter’s life. Her trial concluded that she had been suffering from a severe mental disorder at the time and had also spiralled out of control when she realised that Ciara had begun suffering from symptoms of anorexia, something Lynn had experienced herself as a young woman.

“I personally can’t conceive of any situation where somebody would intellectualise in a sane and rational way the thought that I must kill my child in my child’s interest – and give vent to it,” says Fergus Finlay. “I think something has have had to gone seriously, psychiatrically wrong for the thought to be translated into action.

“In the situation where the psychiatrist drowned her daughter it concerned with the mental health of the woman. And the only possible prevention is one which addresses the mental health of the mother early. As often or not, that’s only going to happen out of luck unless the mother is actively seeking help.”

There are other cases that are even harder to get a handle on. Norah Gibbons, a leading children’s advocate who is currently compiling the report for the Government on children’s deaths while in State care, makes the point that there is “not always an underlying psychiatric illness”.

As adults, we may feel that our children ‘belong’ to us. “Possessiveness, in its positive slant, it can lead us to protect and identify with the child,” says Gibbons. “But then clearly when it gets distorted, a possessive love, whether between adults or adults to children, it turns into a type of total ownership of the person which is completely unhealthy. When that possessive and destructive love is challenged, the child can be killed rather than let the child go to develop as all children must.”

Neighbours and relatives of mother Mary Keegan were stunned and devastated when she stabbed her sons Glen, 10, and Andrew, six, in the kitchen of their comfortable family home in Firhouse, Dublin in February 2006 and then slashed her own neck and wrist. At their inquests, her husband Brian, who had been away on business at the time of the deaths, said that he had not known that his wife was depressed.

“I am proud to have known and married Mary,” he said. “She was the most loving and generous person I ever met and an inspiration to me and our beautiful children. There is no anger in my heart towards her as her actions were borne out of a will to protect our children from the harshness she perceived in this world.”

This would seem to illustrate cases Fergus Finlay relates in which he says that because of the difficulties a mother has had to face, or the difficulties they perceive their child might have to face in the future, “they have come to the intellectual conclusion that if they weren’t there, their child would be better off being with them”.

The family of Galway woman Catherine Palmer found an indication of the turmoil she was in when she drove herself and her two daughters Jennifer, nine, and Louisa, six, off the pier at Kinvara in March 1999. A piece of notepaper found in Catherine’s pocket had “this is hell” written nine times on one side. The words, “a disgusting waste of two beautiful girls, two human beings”, and the words “waste” and “destroy” were written on the other side. She had told her husband Geoffrey that she was bringing the girls swimming at the Leisureplex in Galway.

Cases of murder-suicide at the hands of a parent are mercifully rare, says Dr John Connolly of the Irish Association of Suicidology. “But they get big coverage when they do happen,” he says. “What we’re always worried about when you’re reporting things like this, and the high profile they get, is copycat suicides or murder-suicides.” However, he said that at one point he noted that provincial papers didn’t report suicides, while nationals did. “It’s hard to know which is right. Maybe not to report it is stigmatising it as much.”

Of particular heartbreak were a trio of tragedies that took place in a period of nine months from May 2007 to January 2008. The first concerned Caitriona Innes, a single mum who had just broken up with her boyfriend days before she suffocated her seven-year-old daughter Caitlin at their Letterkenny home in Co Donegal. Caitlin had just received her First Communion that day.

Two months later, in July 2007, the bodies of Nollaig Owen and her baby son Tadhg were recovered from the River Araglin in Co Cork. Nollaig was believed to have been suffering from post-natal depression and a jury returned an open verdict on their deaths although the inquest heard that Nollaig had attempted suicide four days earlier.

Then in January 2008, young mum Eileen Murphy fell from the Cliffs of Moher with her four-year-old son Evan in her arms. The details of how Eileen had travelled from her home near Mallow, Co Cork with Evan, booked into a hotel in Galway the night before their deaths and then bought bus tickets to the Cliffs of Moher were chilling. Her inquest heard that Eileen got off the bus and headed up to the cliff edge so quickly that the driver warned her to be careful. Her family said they were disturbed by inaccurate reports that Eileen had thrown Evan from the cliff first, and then jumped after him.

“Every single one of those cases do require to be seriously looked at,” says Norah Gibbons. “The untimely death of any child needs to be examined because we need to learn from it. I know the Ombudsman for Children recommended to the Government about how the deaths of children should be dealt with in making sure that the learning is picked up.

“They are all absolute tragedies, for the children whose lives have been ended in an untimely manner, and when parents do it it’s an absolute double tragedy.”

• The Samaritans can be contacted 24 hours a day at 1850 609090

THE UNTHINKABLE CASES THAT SHOCKED THE WORLD:
DOMINIQUE COTTREZ
This 46-year-old French woman has two daughters now in their 20s but admitted last month to killing eight of her newborn infants and has since been charged with murder. Bodies of two babies were discovered by occupants of a house in which Cottrez and her husband once lived in Villers-au-Tetre. Family and neighbours maintained they had never noticed her pregnancies because she was an overweight woman.
A lawyer for her husband released a statement saying that the couple were still together: “There is no rejection and they are very united.” Sabine Hilschenz of Germany was convicted in 2006 of also killing eight of her newborns.

ANGELA GORDON
When Angela Gordon’s seven-year-old daughter Khyra Ishaq died in May 2008, she weighed just three stone. She had starved to death following months of neglect and possibly years of physical abuse at their Birmingham home. Gordon and her partner were convicted of manslaughter this year.
What shocked observers was that Khyra and her five siblings had been previously noted to be at-risk children but according to a report into her death, some State agencies “lost sight of the child and focused instead upon the rights of the adults, the adults' behaviour and the potential impact for themselves as professionals”.

ANDREA YATES
When Irish-American Andrea Yates, 36, drowned her five young children – ranging in age from Noah, seven, to baby Mary, six months - in a bathtub on June 20, 2001, the news again rocked Houston, Texas. The ensuing murder trial also made waves worldwide because it put a spotlight on the legal test for sanity called the M’Naghten Rules. Her defence team claimed her murderous actions were a direct result of Yates suffering years of post-natal depression and psychosis.
Yates was convicted of capital murder but in 2006 this was overturned and she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She is now in a low-security state mental hospital.

SUSAN SMITH
In October 1994, Susan Smith drowned her two young sons, buckling them into their car seats as they slept and pushing the car into a lake in South Carolina. Smith became the focus of public anger for sending police on a false manhunt for a non-existent black man who she said had hijacked her car with the children in it, and for her apparently attention-seeking appearances in the media begging for the boys’ return. She confessed nine days later to killing Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months and is serving life in prison for the double murder. She had a court appeal rejected in March of this year.

MARYBETH TINNING
Tinning was considered a very unfortunate mother when she lost nine of her children over a period of 13 years from 1972. Most of the children – including an adopted child - died suddenly when they were babies. Tinning became a well-known visitor to the A&E centres of Schenectady, New York for running in with one of her babies cradled in her arms, either dead or near dead.
When she was finally charged with the murder of her last baby, four-month-old Tami Lynne, in 1985 Tinning admitted smothering three of her children. She was convicted of murder in the second degree in Tami Lynne’s case but there was not felt to be sufficient evidence in the deaths of the other children to take further action. Much coverage of her case has focused on why no social worker, doctor or family member voiced suspicion over the children’s deaths. Tinning, now 67, is still in jail – she was denied parole last year.


WHAT IS INFANTICIDE?
While the murder of children by their mothers receives huge attention when it happens, infanticide – the killing of babies under the age of 12 months – has been a common occurrence throughout history. In ancient times it was sometimes the result of child sacrifice to ‘appease’ the gods, as in Incan and Babylonian culture.

Superstition sometimes played a part – twins were thought to be a harbringer of evil in some cultures and murdered at birth. In others, infanticide was used as a socially accepted method of keeping population numbers down, and girl babies were often most at risk. That practice, though illegal, is thought to still happen in certain parts of densely-populated India and China.

In Irish law, if a woman is charged with killing her baby when it is under one year old, the charging judge can decide to have her tried for infanticide rather than murder. The Infanticide Act says that it is a specific crime that is “tried and punished as for manslaughter”. This is to allow for the fact that the mother may have harmed her baby while suffering negative hormonal effects from childbirth or “lactation”. As such, the penalty for an infanticide conviction would be much lower than if a murder charge had been brought against the mother.


‘THE USUAL TALE, SEDUCTION, DESERTION AND INFANTICIDE’: IRELAND’S LOST BABIES
It is difficult for us to understand the killing of children in our modern society. From Victorian times until the mid-20th century here, however, social and religious factors appeared to have played a big part in the decision of mothers to take their babies’ lives.

In Ireland in the 1940s, for example, there was a spike in infanticides because the Emergency Powers Act during World War II prevented pregnant Irish women from travelling to England to have abortions or to give their babies up for adoption as they had prior to this time.

A study of mothers sent to the Central Mental Hospital in Dublin from 1850 onwards after being charged with infanticide or child murder showed that most of these were admitted in Victorian times. There was evidence in most cases of psychological disturbance, such as in the case of Mrs F, a 31-year-old ballerina who was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude in 1888 for the manslaughter of her baby. Mrs F claimed her cell was haunted and also that she was a capmaker to the British Queen and “could hear speeches from a London via a telephone that ran directly from her cell to the chambers of parliament”.

Poignantly, the study also outlines the sad cases of Miss G, a 20-year-old single servant girl found guilty but insane in 1883 of the murder of her baby and of Miss C, an 18-year-old single woman from Dublin who was admitted in 1888 to the Central Mental Hospital as unfit to plead to the manslaughter of her child.

It appears that Miss C may have been suffering from mental illness but also have had a mental age much younger than her 18 years. She is described, in the rather un-PC words of the time, as “a congenital idiot becoming very excited and violent at each menstrual period”.

Miss G, on the other hand was described as an “unfortunate young woman” who did not appear to be insane at the time of her admission to the hospital. The admitting officer notes sadly that her story was “the usual tale, seduction, desertion and infanticide”.

What's the magic number?

How many lovers in a lifetime is too many?
Susan Daly finds that today's world is not as sexually liberated as we think it is.
Monday August 09 2010

If you thought the dreadful Sex and the City 2 had hammered the final nail into that particular coffin, think again. For Christina Saunders, the SATC-inspired empowerment has only just begun now that she has reached her target of sleeping with 1,000 men in tribute to man-eating character Samantha Jones. Well, everyone should have a hobby, right?

The problem is that Ms Saunders, from Hertfordshire, England, now worries that future lovers might be put off by her 'reputation'. She said: "Good friends stuck by me but others accused me of being a slut . . . Now all I want to do is settle down. I just hope I haven't put men off."

At the other end of the spectrum last month -- the 'sextrum' if you will -- Girls Aloud singer Kimberley Walsh was reported to have had just two lovers in her life and was proud of it. Now Ms Walsh has hit back at these reports to clarify that she had said she had only ever had two serious relationships.

"I never said anything about how many people I'd slept with! It's a very personal thing," she said.

What are we to take from these tales? That it is possible to have too many lovers?

It is presumed that in modern society sexuality has been liberated from the shackles of marriage or, indeed, that sexual mores have never been slacker.

Certainly the most comprehensive global study of sexual attitudes (in 2006) said Irish people were among the most promiscuous in the world. The average Irish person has -- brace yourself, Bridget -- 11 sexual partners in a lifetime. Eleven. Is that really a high figure? (Notwithstanding that anything under 100 looks practically virginal compared to Ms Saunders's exploits.)

Psychology professor David Buss wrote a book on the history of desire and he says that there is "no reason to think that we do more now than in the past, although we are certainly more frank about it".

Religious and social constraints may well have limited the number of sexual partners the Irish had for most of the 20th Century but, historically, the Celts were pretty free and easy with monogamy.

Under Brehon Law, Celtic women had the power to move on to another lover once they walked out of their marriages on February 1. This is an interesting contrast to today's society in which Christina Saunders felt herself judged a "slut", while swordsman Warren Beatty is viewed with a certain awe.

By the 1500s, sex was an important part of Irish festive occasions and wakes often descended into group orgies as a sort of resurrection motif.

There are no shortage of sexually voracious female characters in Irish historical annals and literature.

Pirate queen Grace O'Malley seized castles for her property portfolio and the lords who lived in them for her bedchamber; 18th-Century Irish poem The Midnight Court describes how a middle-aged bachelor is punished by a fairy queen for failing to bring fulfilment to young Irish women; Molly Bloom's romps through James Joyce's Ulysses are deemed to promote "a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity".

By these standards, modern lovers are merely getting to first base. What's more, the fact that we talk more about about who is doing what and how often they are doing it, we might be fooled into thinking everyone else but us is at it.

Christina Saunders, for example, was wrongheaded in thinking that sleeping with 1,000 men would emulate her TV heroine Samantha Jones. Across the six seasons of Sex and The City, Jones actually 'only' had sex with 41 men, and one woman.

As for the sex surveys, those cannot be entirely trusted either. Most surveys in the US, the UK and abroad have found that men report two to four times as many sexual partners as women do.

Statisicians -- and anyone with a grasp of simple maths -- say that can't be true. Presuming the men aren't counting incidents of self-love, both genders must average out at the same number of lovers.

Psychologists at the University of Michigan think that the discrepancy is a result of the very different methods men and women use to make estimates. Women are more likely to rely on enumeration. "This is a strategy that typically leads to underestimation," says psychologist Norman R Brown.

"Men are twice as likely to use rough approximation to answer and that typically leads to over-estimation."

It may be that celebrity womanisers like Warren Beatty or Mickey Rourke are neither lovers nor liars after all. They are just bad at counting on their fingers.


Does the 'lover number' matter? What the experts think...
Lisa O'Hara, relationship counsellor with Marriage and Relationship Counselling Services (www.mrcs.ie):

"What I find is that it is a partner's relationship history, rather than their sexual one, that bothers people. It is how their history of relationship dynamics repeats that can be damaging.

"My own thought is: don't talk about how many sexual partners you have had. You put ghosts in the bedroom of your current relationship, and if you are a person who has had many partners it can be misinterpreted. It can be just down to the age you are.

"Saying that, if you have a person who had loads of casual sexual flings, I wonder if when they were in a relationship, would they crave the variety they once had?"

Dr Derek Freedman, specialist in sexually transmitted diseases:

"I think to try and quantify what is 'normal' in something as biologically dynamic as sexual activity is difficult. The point is that people go through different stages in life.

"One thing I find striking is that those people coming in to me who have had a higher number of lovers -- and I've seen people who have had 250/300 partners -- I am more likely to find that they are clear. It is often the person who gets drunk once and sleeps with someone, unprotected, who is infected.

"The bottom line is that it isn't the number that matters -- if you are irresponsible sexually even just once, there is always a risk, and one should be tested for peace of mind."

THE PLAYERS....

GENGHIS KHAN:

DNA screening has showed that 8pc of the Central Asian population is directly descended from 13th-century warlord Khan. He took many wives while conquering lands from China to India to North Africa to Eastern Europe.

CATHERINE THE GREAT:

Horsepower aside, the Empress Catherine was a prodigious lover. She handpicked the most handsome men in the Russian empire and then gifted them some land as a farewell when she tired of them.

GIACOMO CASANOVA:

"Cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life," wrote mathematician and lawyer Casanova. How true -- history does not record his arithmetic skills.

WILT CHAMBERLAIN:

LA Lakers basketball player Chamberlain bested Warren Beatty's 12,775 lovers by claiming he slept with 20,000 women. Well, probably not 'slept'. He can't have had much time for shuteye.

FIDEL CASTRO:

Again proving that being active in the bedroom doesn't preclude getting a good day's work in, it is said that Castro had sex twice a day for 40 years -- and never with the same woman.

...AND THE PURE

ELIZABETH I:

Yes, the 'Virgin Queen' moniker is highly disputed as we now know she had several 'close friendships'. But any union when you are Queen of England is loaded with power issues so while Elizabeth had her cake and ate it, she was careful to brush the crumbs from the table.

EMILY DICKINSON:

Being a virgin doesn't mean you can't relate to the full spectrum of human passions and fears. Virginal Dickinson left behind over 1,000 poems after dying a virtual recluse.

JM BARRIE:

The creator of Peter Pan remained a virgin all of his 77 years. He was said to have an overbearing mother.

SIGMUND FREUD:

He spent a lifetime theorising about human psychosexual behaviour but only experienced the sexual act upon his marriage at the age of 30.

JESSICA SIMPSON:

Again, no longer a virgin, but the singer was a role model to the teen abstinence movement, 'saving' herself for marriage to Nick Lachey at 22.

Romance at the races

By Susan Daly
Friday Jul 23 2010

THE thrill of the chase is not confined to the track during the Galway Races. While some racegoers admittedly come to watch hundreds of kilos of horseflesh sweating to the finishing line, for many the excitement is all in the heaving throngs of bodies in the course bars.
WB Yeats put it plainly in his poem 'At Galway Races': "There where the course is, Delight makes all of the one mind." He might have been referring to the gee-gees, but he could just as easily have been speaking of romance at the races. When the social lubricants of booze and banter are mixed in, it makes a heady cocktail.

"The champagne tent is a great place to meet people, and I would say that the Long Bar in the Millennium Stand are where most of the action is," says Sandra McGinnelly, public relations officer at Ballybrit Racecourse.

Naturally, the potential for a fling in such circumstances is high. Some last about as long as the festival -- "what goes on in Galway, stays in Galway", one society beauty told the Irish Independent -- but the festival has also spawned its fair share of long-lasting love affairs and marriages.

Property developer Sean Dunne and former gossip columnist Gayle Killilea famously met at the Galway Races in 2002. They went on to marry in 2004, celebrating with friends in a ¿1.5m bash onboard the Cristina O, the luxury yacht where Aristotle Onassis once wed Jackie Kennedy.

The euphoric atmosphere at the races is almost certainly to blame for a few romantic matches. Dr Jane Mulrooney runs a cosmetic dermatology clinic in Sandymount, Dublin, with her sister Katherine (where their list of clients includes most of Ireland's who's who) and both women make a point of returning to their native Galway for the fun of the races every July.

"You couldn't miss the Galway Races," says Jane, "because everybody is in a party mood. There are a lot of guys there because of the sport and everyone is up for a chat, swapping tips, flirting, bantering. It's so easy to meet people."

True to form, Jane met now-husband Philip Hackett (of Hackett Bookmakers) at the Galway Races in 2003. As was the Celtic Tiger trend at the time, Jane and Philip met on a helicopter taking revellers out to Ballybrit from the city.

"It was Ladies' Day and the phones were down because it was so busy," says Jane. "He lost all his friends and I lost mine. He got a tip for a horse that came in at 14 to 1 -- I was sticking to him after that!"

Sadly, Jane's father died not long after the races so she was not socialising for several months afterwards, but she and Philip reunited for dinner in Dublin that October. When she moved to London in 2004 to specialise in dermatology it put the couple to the test, but they finally married in May of this year.

Even those folks supposedly focused on the horses have found themselves drawn into the seductive Ballybrit atmosphere. Top-flight trainer Aidan O'Brien met his wife Anne Marie Crowley there over 20 years ago when they were both riding as amateur jockeys in the same race.

"I went up to have a chat to Aidan behind the barriers," Anne Marie says. "We had a bit of a bet going on Aidan's horse." Aidan's horse came in first, Anne Marie came in third and they sealed their partnership by marrying shortly afterwards.

Jockey Barry Geraghty was also celebrating when he met wife-to-be Paula Heaphy at the Galway Races in 2004. "He had had a few winners and was celebrating when a mutual friend introduced us," says Paula. "He was in great form!" The pair didn't meet again until that September at the race festival in Listowel, close to Paula's home, but they went on to have a daughter Siofra, now 4, and were married in Killarney last January.

"We got engaged in Cheltenham. On the Friday they throw a party in the weigh-in room for friends and family," says Paula. "As we had always said we would have a small wedding, I think Barry had it in the back of his mind that we would have a big engagement party. He had told Ruby (Walsh) earlier on that he was going to do it, so Ruby stood up and announced that Barry had a few words to say. The next thing he was on his knee -- that was the best part of it, it was such a big surprise!"

The Geraghtys are looking forward to their Galway outing next week as newlyweds. "Galway is one of our favourites and it will always be special to us because that is where we met," says Paula.

Galway seems to spark big romantic gestures. Take Seamus Forde, for example. Last year he watched as his girlfriend, Mary Therese McDonnell from Co Mayo, was chosen as Best Dressed Lady on the Thursday. Seeing her on the podium in all her pomp, Seamus decided he just had to make her his wife. He proposed two days later and today, they marry in Westport.

"We left Galway that Saturday to go on holidays in Portugal and Seamus proposed," says a delighted Mary Therese. "He told me that he decided on Thursday when was looking up at me on the podium in Ballybrit. He was so hugely proud of me and so glad to be there and part of it."

Spontaneous Seamus contacted a jeweller in Malahide about a ring. "Seamus got the jeweller to take a picture of the ring and sent it to his BlackBerry so he could show it to me when he proposed," says Mary Therese.

The couple will miss this year's Ladies' Day because they will be on honeymoon. "That day at the Galway Races really did change my life," says Mary Therese. "We are looking forward to going back next year as Mr and Mrs Forde."

There is a long tradition of mixing the serious business of racing with pleasure. One of the great romances sparked at the Galway Races was between Lord Killanin, Michael Morris, in whose memory the new Killanin Stand at Ballybrit is named, and his wife Sheila. He was chairman of the Galway Races trust for many years.

"It was just after the war and life was starting all over again," recalls Breda Ryan, whose late husband Patrick was also once chairman of the Galway races. "Lord Killanin was from one of the tribes of Galway and Sheila Dunlop's father was a clergyman in Oughterard. She was home from London, they met in the Great Southern Hotel on one of the race nights and that was it."

The family is still very much part of the fabric of Galway week -- the Killanins' youngest son is respected horse trainer Michael 'Mouse' Morris.

Incidentally, Breda's second-ever date with her husband Patrick was to the races in 1959. "We were introduced at a party and he invited me back to the races," she says. "He later told me that he had previously noticed me cycling past on a bicycle in a yellow dress." They were married for 45 years until Patrick's death in 2004.

In the 1940s, Galway was just a two-day race meet, but Breda recalls that the excitement and glamour was no less for that. "In the war, petrol was scarce so they went out to Ballybrit in jaunting cars and bicycles. My mother-in-law would be trimming hats weeks in advance for women to wear.

"Nothing has changed there -- it was always a place for ladies of great flair to strut their stuff," says Breda, whose son Anthony Ryan, MD of the family department store on Shop Street, is sponsoring the Best Dressed Ladies competition on the Thursday.

The romantic story of the Killanins might be just the thing to inspire the singletons who will be saddling up for potential romance on the second floor of the Killanin stand on the Friday evening of the races.

In the largest-ever singles event held at a racecourse, AnotherFriend.com and the Galway Races are hosting The Singles Party, which kicks off with the first race at 5pm and continues until 10pm and the 'lover buses' run to Eyre Square all evening, should you find a dead cert for romance and wish to go on to celebrate!

It's a new twist to finding romance on the Ballybrit stands as the country's finest horse flesh flashes by. Tickets are e25 and include admission, a drinks voucher, a free e5 tote bet and the services of a DJ to help punters show off their finest mating moves on the dancefloor (see anotherfriend.com for more info).

The Galway Races have always been a good place to mingle with other singles but getting them all together under one roof? Those are surely excellent odds for finding a mate at Race Week.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/meeting-your-true-love-at-the-galway-races-2269958.html

Who cares if these guys are just not into you?

A few years ago, a book title proposed a simple six-word explanation for shoddy male romantic behaviour: He's Just Not That Into You.

The book was inspired by an episode of Sex and the City -- of course -- in which Carrie's boyfriend Berger claims that women waste too much time trying to analyse why men turn cold/avoid commitment/don't call when they say they will.

Don't take it personally girls, says Berger. When a man behaves like this it is because 'he's just not that into you'. Forget him and find a man who is.

Liberating as this little aphorism is, it is beyond simplistic. It also implies that if a guy is acting peculiar, it's not him, it's you.

Dating columnist Zoe Strimpel decided that there must be more behind the mixed messages women receive from men than simple disinterest. (There's probably a book waiting to be written about signals flying from the opposite direction too.)

Instead of torturing herself over cocktails with her girlfriends about what goes on inside a man's mind, Strimpel spent a year interviewing hundreds of men for her new book: What The Hell Is He Thinking? She stresses that the men she interviewed were “all articulate, smart, thoughtful and basically good guys”.

Yet even the saintliest of these -- even if they didn't condone certain bad behaviour among their cohorts -- could at least explain why it happens.

“The name of the game is not to be thrown when a guy does something weird,” says Strimpel. “Rather, to recognise what it might mean, and where it's coming from.”

So, straight from the horses' mouths came these surprising revelations:

Men read women's magazines ...

Some men do actually pick up tips from women's mags -- and it is not necessarily a good thing. Strimpel relates the tale of Christian, a guy who brought her on luxurious dates, bought her a toothbrush to keep at his, and texted her loving messages while away on business.

After a perfect weekend together, he left her at a train station on Sunday evening with a chilly 'Don't be a stranger' parting.

One man explained: “Unlike dogs, men can and do read what's written about them, so they also know how to manipulate perceptions.

“While it suited him he was more than happy to keep the relationship going, and pulling all the tricks he'd learnt from reading girlfriend's copies of Cosmopolitan... But when it didn't suit him he let it slip.”

Your mum wasn't wrong when she said, 'Once a cheater, always a cheater' ...

Most of the men interviewed were clear about one thing with adultery: if you end up in a relationship with an attached man, never fool yourself that you were simply too irresistible.

Says Gary: “The chance to cheat is constantly available and yet so far I've resisted it. I could do all sorts of psychoanalysis, but the bottom line is: that's just who they are. And the bottom line for (a cheater): that's just who they are ... . If he cheats on you, he's an adulterer at heart.” We have been warned.

Some women end up finishing a relationship -- when it's really the man who wants out ...

A woman ends a relationship because she can't seem to make her man happy: why then does she feel so bad when she's the one who has done the dumping?

Barry, a “lovely guy” and old school friend of Strimpel's, explains: “Obviously if you've been going out with a girl you like her, so you don't necessarily want to dump her and you don't want to hurt her. So you just make the relationship deteriorate until she is forced to dump you.”

Rob, a serial monogamist, is more blunt: “Men are cowards. If we can avoid confrontation and letting someone down, we will.”

So women get to do the dirty work. Thanks guys.

A man who doesn't mind if you leave a whole set of clothes at their house might freak out over a few bracelets left by the sink ...

Women are supposed to be the drama queens in relationships but if some of the men in Strimpel's book are to go by, we don't read half as much into the little things as men do.

One guy dumps a new-ish girlfriend when she leaves her watch and bracelets in the bathroom. Many of her male interviewees understood his reaction.

“I wouldn't mind if my girlfriend, who stays at mine regularly, leaves in my room a toothbrush, contact lenses liquid or even a spare pair of pants for practical reasons,” says Peter.

But anything other than purely functional items are seen as precursors to leaving a lot more, “and then, basically, her moving in “.

Men have feelings too ...

There is a common perception that men are more libidinous than women and that if they are not looking for some action of an evening they are tired, burnt out or drunk.

Sometimes men -- just like women -- lack the confidence to make the first move.

“It's not that I have any weird issue with it, “ says one poor soul, “It's like you're frozen by an irrational fear of being rejected, even though you know you won't be.”

Intelligence can be a turn-off ...

I know, I know. All those bras burned for nothing.

“Women should be intelligent, yes, but lovely and smelling of roses,” says a charmer called Rob. What?! “It's just biology: it's hard-wired into us.”

Thankfully many of Strimpel's interviewees disagreed.

“Maybe it comes down to ambition rather than intelligence,” suggests one.

“No one, man or woman, wants to feel like they'll play second fiddle to someone else's career. There are ways to talk about how much you like your job that don't make it seem it's the only thing in your life.”

Women need to toughen up ...

Clearly, men are not all either wimps or bastards, but there are some serious bad pennies out there.

The key to not getting landed with one, say Strimpel's men, is to demand to be treated well and to leave if you're not. Women should take more responsibility, they conclude.

“Hardly the response you'd expect when the guy is the one acting like a tosser,” says Strimpel.

“But we need to get tough and have the courage to walk away. If we hang about for sub-standard treatment, it's our fault when we get it.”

What The Hell Is He Thinking: All the questions you've ever asked about men answered. By Zoe Strimpel, published by Penguin, €10.80, on sale now.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/revealed-the-real-reasons-why-hes-just-not-that-into-you-2263848.html

WHAT THE BADLY BEHAVED MALE SAYS (AND THINKS)

What he says: I bought you a toothbrush to keep at my place.

What he means: I've seen Sex and The City. I know a toothbrush will buy me time before you want to actually move in.

What he says: I'm not in love with my ex but I think her new guy just isn't right for her.

What he means: I'm still in love with my ex.

What he says: I would love to have sex but I don't want to ruin our friendship.

What he means: I don't want you to be my girlfriend but I quite fancy having a friend-with-benefits.

What he says: I was going to tell my wife about us last night but she was ill/busy with the kids/upset about the dog dying.

What he means: I will never leave my wife. Why would I? I am having my cake and eating it too.

What he says: It's not you, it's me.

What he means: It's not me, it's you. I just want you to end up comforting me as I break your heart.

Read more: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/what-the-badlybehaved-male-says-and-what-he-actually-means-2263850.html

THE QUICKFIRE ROUND: Honest answers on love's big questions:
What's the maximum number of guys a girl can have slept with for you to feel comfortable?

"Ten is the absolute max. If it's more than that, just lie." -- Victor

How do you feel about a girl making the first move?

"I think it's brilliant! It's only too forward if you're not actually all that keen on the woman." -- Tim B

Is intelligence more important than beauty in a woman?

"Sure I'd date a stupid woman. I'm not sure how long it would last." -- Tim V

What is so scary about moving in with someone?

"Moving in together feels like an all-to-play-for move. If you've ever had to move out of a place you've shared with a girlfriend, you know that it feels like 'My Little Divorce'." -- James E

What is the most common excuse men use to keep things casual?

"If you're not that into her, you'll say, 'I'm going out with the boys, come meet me afterwards', rather than ask her to 'come with'. It's a subtle booty call which is a big hint." -- Victor L

The clown and the contortionist

From today's Irish Independent:
By Susan Daly
There are days when it's tempting to run away and join the circus but for most the fantasy is rarely realised. Not so for one girl who travelled 8,000km to join the circus -- and found love in the process.

Contortionist Wang Dan (Dani) and resident clown Otto currently open the Fossett's circus show with a joint juggling trick. What the crowd don't know is that the performers are a romantic double act outside the ring. Although they make an odd couple in their stage outfits, Edward Fossett (aka Otto) and Dani are a handsome couple in their civvies.

"Lots of people meet through work," says Edward (22). "It's just that our work isn't like most people's."

Edward is heir to the Fossett's family circus, the world's oldest continuously-touring show. Dani (21) came to work with them for a season from an acrobatic school outside Beijing, China, in 2006. Arriving with two fellow contortionist Chinese friends, she experienced serious culture shock.

"We couldn't speak English then, only a tiny bit, so we three just kept together and practised together," says Dani in English now tinged with a Dublin accent.

Edward was in his Leaving Cert year at the family's home base in Lucan, Dublin, when Dani arrived but would visit the circus wherever it was at weekends to put on his clowning hat.

"We began to talk to each other backstage during the show," he explains. "When you're on the show, it's like a little community, it binds people together. We actually got together on my 19th birthday -- Dani would have been 18."

But the course of true love never runs smooth. When the season ended, Dani had to return to China with her friends. "We were never off the phone were we, honey?" Edward says, turning to her. A year later, she was asked back by Fossett's to resume her popular contortionist act.

"The first time, 2008, when I came back on my own, I did feel lonely," says Dani. "But I am close to Sonia and Sarah (Edward's two younger sisters). It feels like I have friends here and a boyfriend here, so it is much, much better now."

She misses Chinese food. "I don't know how to cook though," she laughs, "but Edward is very good at it -- I like his pasta."

While our photographs of them in costume would be an extraordinary addition to most family albums, Edward and Dani's relationship is not entirely breaking with tradition. Edward's grandfather, Teddy Fossett, married an aerialist from Czechoslovakia.

"My mum came to Ireland with her parents and sister in the late 1940s to come work with my father and uncle," says their son Eddie, current MD of Fossett's and father of Edward (having an Edward in each generation also runs in the family). "She fell in love with dad and never left."

The close-knit and nomadic nature of circus life can be difficult for outsiders to understand or infiltrate. "Saying that, circus children don't necessarily fall in love with other people from the circus," says dad Eddie. "My wife was a wages clerk in (plumbing merchants) PJ Matthews when I met her."

Son Edward agrees that Dani and he are lucky. "It's true that it's not very easy to find someone of the same age who you are attracted to working in the whole circus area. But it would be harder if I went out with someone who wasn't in the business because I'd be away from them the whole time."

Conversely, working and living in the same quarters can be a hard ask. "Sometimes we go have a cup of coffee together in the nearest town, go shopping for an hour, yeah, for hairspray!" says Edward, referring to Otto's Jedward-style quiff. "Just to get off the site and away from everybody on our own is nice."

The pair also share an understanding of the hard work required with performing for a living. Dani attended a live-in performance school in China from when she was five years old. She would get up at 5.30am and practise until 8.30pm, with just breaks for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

"That was tough," she says. "When I was seven years old, I said, 'I don't want to go there any more' and my dad said, 'Okay, we won't'. But I decided to go back after a few months and stayed until I was 17."

Edward's earliest memories are of dad Eddie training circus animals. He thought he would follow in his dad's footsteps and had his own pony act in the show at the age of nine. When Edward was 14, the resident clown broke his arm and he had to step in. "I was crapping myself the first day but I got through it okay. The make-up helped -- it's a bit of a mask."

He got the clowning bug and, when Fossett's decided not to continue with animal acts, being the funnyman became a full-time career.

As with many family businesses, it is presumed that Edward will eventually take over the reins from his father -- especially since circus performance was designated an official artform in 2003.

"That has implications for Dani and I," he says, "I'm not a normal artist -- I'm the boss's son. As I get older I have to take on more responsibility. The longer Dani stays here and the closer we get, the more responsibility she will have to take on."

As for running away from the circus, well, Dani mentions she would like to go travelling at some stage.

"I would love to go away for a year too," says Edward. "But maybe to another show to see how they do it."

Once a Fossett ...
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/when-the-contortionist-met-the-clown-it-was-love-at-first-sight-2239480.html

Next-of-kin: The bumper issue! Peter Sheridan, Louise Lennox and Katherine Lynch

A few pieces from my Next-of-Kin series for the Weekend magazine were published while I was away, so here's who you (and I) may have missed!

Playwright PETER SHERIDAN and son FIACHRA
Peter Sheridan has moulded his life around the arts. He and brother Jim founded the Project Theatre Company in Dublin in the early 1970s, Peter going on to become a prolific playwright and author and Jim directing films like My Left Foot, The Field and In The Name of The Father.

“Our dad introduced us to the theatre when we were teenagers and we just fell in love with this medium even though we had been playing music, we had been in a garage band together,” says Peter.

Despite this familial way with words, Peter was surprised when his youngest son Fiachra approached him with a draft of his first book, a memoir called The Runners. It was published last year.

“I was very surprised when Fiachra started writing because of all my four kids I would have least expected him to,” says Peter. “My daughter Doireann always had a strong interest in my work, but the conversation between me and Fiachra would have been more like, ‘Isn’t it terrible Liverpool were beaten 3-1 yesterday?’”

There was no-one more surprised than Fiachra. He had a chequered career in his 20s, spanning a spell as League of Ireland footballer and a hedge fund manager and, eventually, his current day job as a maths teacher. “I went through a lot to realise teaching was what I loved,” says Fiachra. He wrote The Runners at weekends and in the holidays, and is currently working on a sequel.

“For the whole of my 20s, I really hadn’t a clue what I was doing. I think now: How did Dad achieve so much in that time? He had four kids in his 20s. I was nearly 30 when I had my first.”

Peter and Jim had just turned 20 when they founded the Project. Fiachra thinks his experiences of growing up in an artistic environment might have delayed the bite of the writing bug.

“I hated the arts and all I wanted to do was play football,” he says. “All I saw was the Project and actors sitting around drinking coffee and going to rehearsals. As a kid, rehearsals are inherently boring. When you’re a kid, you rebel against everything your father does.”

Peter, although committed to the arts, understood his son’s reluctance. “To be honest, I would have much preferred if they became footballers because that’s what I wanted when I was a kid, maybe play for Man United,” he says.

Neither, says Fiachra, did the financial insecurity of a career in the arts appeal.
“They (children Doireann, Ross, Fiachra and Nuala) always felt that the arts equaled poverty and they were right,” says Peter, “We were living on very small pickings in the 1970s and 80s. We lived in a very small house in Ballybough, I remember my two daughters sharing a bedroom that you could barely fit the bunk bed in.”

These days, Fiachra can see his dad’s house from the bedroom window of the north Dublin home he shares with his wife and their two small children. In the back garden, his six-month-old son Julen is gurgling at his granddad.

“When he became a father, I felt it was this huge bonding thing in the family,” says Peter. “You feel that thing of life starting again, of the circle continuing. It’s been a big bonding thing for us and has deepened our relationship in the past few years.”

The writing too has brought them together. “When Fiachra came to me with his first attempts, I was so taken aback. He has that gift of expressing something in a very unaffected manner.”

Praise from a proud father? Fiachra demurs. “I know the most honest opinion I will get will be from him. I don’t fear showing him something and him telling me it’s crap. That’s alright.”
• Peter Sheridan directs The Shawshank Redemption at the Gaiety Theatre Dublin until May 29.


TV chef LOUISE LENNOX and her sister NICOLA
When pastry chef Louise Lennox appears on RTE’S The Restaurant, sister Nicola is often carefully watching. Not to see Louise keep the visiting celebrity cooks in line - but to check that Nicola’s clothes are not making a surprise appearance on TV.

“My flatmate is convinced Louise has a key to our place and she comes up when we’re not there and raids our wardrobes,” says Nicola. “It’s when she wears the stuff to cook in that it annoys me. They get destroyed. She gets chocolate everywhere!”
Nicola, a nanny, tuned in one day to see Louise do a cookery demo on The Afternoon Show. “I was making a sandwich for the little girl I was minding and told her to tell me when Lou Lou was on the telly. She comes running in saying, ‘Nicky, Lou Lou is wearing a pair of your earrings!’”

Apart from the issue of accessories gone AWOL, their relationship as adults is much more stable than it was as children. The youngest two of five, there was a substantial gap between Nicola and Louise and their older siblings. As a result, they were both “the babies” of the household.

“We were as thick as thieves because we shared a room together,” says Louise, “But then we’d kill each other and be best friends an hour later.”
When they fought, they’d fight ferociously. “Oh, hair-pulling and biting and scraping,” says Nicola, “We each had our signature moves. I would start to cry and Louise would give me one of her sweets if I wouldn’t tell Mum, and I’d be like, ‘Okay’.”

Two very difficult times in their lives pushed the childish battles behind them. Both girls were diagnosed with dyslexia as youngsters. While Nicola felt her secondary school was supportive, Louise felt no-one but her siblings could really understand the frustration and embarrassment she suffered as a result of her reading difficulties.

“It’s kind of how I got into cookery,” says Louise. “I used to stutter through reading assignments so my teacher let me figure out recipes from a cookbook my aunt gave me when I was ten and bake a cake for my homework. That was great – it gave me self-belief.”

She needed that confidence when she started secondary school, a different one to that which Nicola attended.

“The teacher would make me stand up and read and I’d have panic attacks, feeling this heaviness all around me. I couldn’t even read words like ‘the’ and ‘these’, which I normally could. I bunked off school a lot so I wouldn’t have to read aloud.”

Then, when Louise was 17, her best friend Janice died in an accident.
“Louise is two and a half years older than me and that was a huge age gap when I was 14, but when Janice died it drove us closer together,” says Nicola.
“From the day Janice died, I used to sleep on Louise’s floor,” says Nicola.

Louise takes up the story: “Because I was afraid to sleep on my own. Scared Janice would come down to say, I’m okay!’ It was okay for me to cry around Nicky. I’m really weird about letting people see me cry, but I felt comfortable in her space and then we developed a friendship on a whole new level.”

Louise describes Nicola as “really caring” – she does a lot of voluntary work outside her job as a nanny – and for her part, Nicola is proud of her sister’s TV work but knows it’s not for her.

“Our parents never compared us to each other,” says Louise, “There’s never been sibling rivalry in that way.”
Nicola thinks for a moment and adds: “The only thing I would be really jealous of is if she got to do something with Westlife. I really like them and she just wouldn’t appreciate it!”


Comedy actress KATHERINE LYNCH and best friend WARREN MEYLER
ONLY a very, very good friend can persuade a woman to burst out of a costume shaped like a sanitary product in front of a packed auditorium.

That was the test of friendship set for TV comedy star Katherine Lynch by her best pal and co-writer Warren Meyler – and she passed. As the only woman among a chorus of men entering Alternative Miss Ireland in 1998, Katherine had to stand out. She chose a drag alter-ego, Tampy Lilette, who she describes as a periodically-obsessed country and western singer.

“So we had her burst out of a giant tampon onto the stage, saying, ‘Sorry I’m a little late!’” laughs Warren.
“I was going, ‘What is that?’ when he suggested it,” says Katherine, “And Warren was saying, ‘It’s a tampon. Just get into it’.”

The pair take their comedy quite seriously now. They run their own production company, Waka, which created the RTE2 series Single Ladies and Wonderwomen, with Katherine the performer and Warren producer, director and co-writer.

Their shared comedy roots go back to the mid-1990s when they first met but it wasn’t exactly friendship at first sight. Warren was working in a late-night café in Temple Bar called Smalltalk – “a real whiskey-in-the-teapot place” – when Katherine started as a waitress.

“We hated each other at first,” he said. “I thought she was weird, and she thought I was weird.” (Katherine interrupts: “He WAS weird. Warren was a Michael Jackson fan and he moonwalked everywhere.” For the record, Warren denies this. Strongly.)

Working nights proved a bonding experience. “We used to have people on shift work coming in, from doctors to U2 and Boyzone,” says Katherine. “One night Quentin Tarantino and Mira Sorvino came in and stayed till six in the morning because we doused them in whiskey. I sang Caledonia for Mira and she cried… in pain.”

They “settled into each other” and discovered a mutual love of kitsch, slapstick humour.

“We shared a flat together on Parliament Street and when we were broke we’d be sitting in and doing sketches and that’s how we ended up writing comedy together,” says Warren.

Over a decade on, Warren and Katherine still socialise and work together. They say their romantic partners are very understanding of their close friendship. Ask if that was always the case in the past and they laugh. “There have been one or two situations like that but someone who is threatened by your friendships isn’t right for you,” says Warren.

They are currently holed up in an office together writing material for Katherine’s live shows in Vicar Street this August. (“And Warren’s doing my VAT for me,” adds Katherine.) Don’t they ever get on each other nerves? “We laugh loads and we argue loads,” says Katherine.

They are still pals with the Smalltalk gang some of whom, like Brendan Courtney and Declan Buckley (aka Shirley Temple Bar), have also found success in the entertainment biz. They might be all grown-up now but it doesn’t take much prompting to get Katherine and Warren reminiscing about their party days.

“We were adamant we were going to get into the MTV awards when they were in Dublin, do you remember that?” says Warren. They blagged into seats beside Whitney Houston – with Katherine dressed in a floor-length white puffa coat pretending to be a Dublin hip hop star and Warren and a friend as her backing dancers.

“The poor boys were dressed like a pair of gay dancers with bellytops on them,” says Katherine, “I couldn’t take my coat off because I had my work clothes from the restaurant on underneath. I was sweating buckets!” Sounds like a good idea for a comedy sketch…

Next-of-Kin: Finbarr Wright and wife Angela

NEXT-OF-KIN is a new series I have started for the Irish Independent's Weekend magazine, interviewing some well-known faces and the person closest to them about their relationship.
We kicked off with the very happy, very jolly tenor Finbarr Wright and his wife Angela...

Singer Finbar Wright has serenaded us with songs of love for two decades – but it was the siren call of his wife Angela that he found impossible to resist. The couple first met when they both attended singing classes at the Cork School of Music in the late 1980s.
“Her lesson was after mine and the routine was that she’d arrive early and sit inside the door, this gorgeous blonde,” says Finbar. “I never missed a singing lesson!”
Angela waves away his romantic take on events. “The real story is that the teacher was so enamoured with his voice that his lesson would run longer and eat into my time,” she laughs. “That’s the reason he’s a singer and I’m not!”
The couple didn’t get together until Angela went to UCC a year or so later. “Finbar tricked me,” says Angela. “He pretended he wanted access to the library to see some music scores. He had left UCC at that stage so I had to sneak him in under my card.
“It was just an excuse for him to say to me, ‘I have to make it up to you; let me take you out’!” Mindful of the age gap between them – “we say it’s ten years, but it’s nearer 12” – Angela resisted the date at first. “I remember being nervous and wanting to cancel the date the day before but I’m glad I didn’t. We just clicked. We never looked back.”
The couple’s two children are now nearly grown. Son Fergus is nearly 18 and daughter Ileana has just turned 16. “Angela was so vital to the growth of my career because she had to carry on with everything while I was away singing,” says Finbar who is celebrating 20 years as a professional singer this year with a nationwide tour. The couple also celebrate their 20th anniversary this year.
“We married in 1990, before my first album came out,” says Finbar. “Starting off and building a career in showbiz is difficult and we had lean times, certainly.”
Angela remembers one friend asking her if she knew what she was letting herself in for at the time of her marriage. “She said, ‘Are you mad? This guy is only starting down the road.’ It thought it was her who was mad. I was madly in love and there is no life unless it’s with Finbar. You can’t be in a bad mood when he’s around.”
Accordingly, the times when Finbar is away from home can be tough. “The week before he goes, I absolutely hate that,” she says. “But what’s strange is that I can’t wait until he goes because then I can physically count the days until he’s back again.”
Finbar finds that absence makes the heart grow fonder. “Definitely,” he says, “It has kept the relationship very fresh and it’s lovely coming back together. The first night I’m back, we go out to dinner and we always make time for each other.”
Angela lectures in marketing at Cork Institute of Technology. She has always worked, even with the children, and finds that when Finbar’s away she can actually get a lot done. “She studied for a PhD that way,” says Finbar, “I have to call her Doctor!”
The busy pair sometimes daydream about retreating to a little house in France. “We say that about once a month,” jokes Finbar.
“Sometimes we talk about taking a year off,” adds Angela, “but it’s all been a journey for us. I didn’t know what would happen – but it has exceeded my expectations.”
• Finbar Wright celebrate 20 years in music at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin on May 9. Dates for his other concerts nationwide are at www.finbarwright.com

Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do?

The truth about stars who say they're sex addicts
Yes, there is such an illness -- but many just use it as an excuse for bad behaviour, says Susan Daly

Saturday March 27 2010

When Eldrick Tont Woods was still the king of clean, Nike deified him in their iconic, oft-parodied, "I am Tiger Woods" TV commercial.

Thirteen years later, those parodies could be updated with the addition of those five little words: "I am Tiger Woods -- and I'm a sex addict."

It has become the justification du jour for celebrities caught with their trousers down. We especially expected to hear it last Sunday when the man with a catalogue of multimillion-dollar endorsements and a marriage to save gave his first post-rehab interviews.

Clearly, being labelled a serial philanderer is not good for the image, implying as it does a selfish, immoral, undisciplined personality. Applying the term 'addiction' to such behaviour reclassifies it as a psychological disorder, thereby rebranding the trespasser as a victim.

It was thought at one point that erstwhile England captain John Terry might spend a highly publicised spell in a sex-treatment programme to atone publicly for his sins against his wife and team-mates. Likewise, the newly separated Ashley Cole.

Russell Brand, David Duchovny and Halle Berry's ex-husband Eric Benet have all confessed in the past to 'suffering' from sexual addiction.

Whether such high-profile figures are chemically addicted to sex -- or just happily promiscuous until they are forced to give it a more PR-friendly label -- is up for debate.

Interestingly, Woods has refused to use the term 'sexual addiction' in his latest round of mea culpas ahead of the US Masters. He needs to start building bridges with his fans and big-name brands -- and quickly.

His people afforded two television sports stations five minutes each last weekend to quiz Woods on his 'recovery' after 45 days of in-patient treatment. Woods used terms like "disgusting" and "denial" to describe the "bad things" he had done; but also triumphal words like "conquering" and "strength" to ascribe his recovery to his own depth of character. Love the sinner, not the sin.

But when asked directly what exactly he had been in treatment for, Woods refused to elaborate. "That's a private matter," he said.

Dr Eoin Stephens, head of training at the Irish Centre for Sexual Addictions, is adamant that sexual addiction is very real, but that the term can also be abused.

"It can certainly be misused and overdone as a diagnosis," he says.

"This happens partly in the religious right in America, where any sexual behaviour deemed unacceptable can be classified in that way."

Tiger's retreat from the words, he says, could be read in many ways.

"One possibility is that he doesn't want the label or it could be that his behaviour wasn't actually as a result of sexual addiction. I've met people who aren't really out of control but have a sense of entitlement to inappropriate behaviour."

Relationship psychotherapist David Kavanagh doesn't like the use of the term at all. Instead, he describes the "sexual compulsivity" that he believes is causing problems in the relationships of roughly one-10th of his clients.

"In some situations, celebrities have used sex addiction as a get-out-of-jail card," he says, "but I think it is being seen as a shame-based description.

"People think it's easy for famous people to trot it out to evade blame for their behaviour but in some ways, it's more socially acceptable to say you are an alcoholic than to say you are a sex addict."

The medical community does not universally accept sexual addiction as a genuine psychological diagnosis. The committee behind the next edition of the psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is due out in 2013, has announced that they won't be including it in the giant tome.

The proposed diagnosis for excessive sexual behaviours that impact negatively on one's relationships, work and mental health, will be called "hypersexual disorder".

So, no, it's not an official diagnosis, says Dr Eoin Stephens, "but then neither was post-traumatic stress until 1980."

This public perception is also often that sex rehab centres and celeb PR gurus are trying to medicalise what is simply bad behaviour.

"If I have to have an addiction, I'll take that one," goes the joke.

David Duchovny's announcement in 2008 that he was getting treatment for sexual addiction was accompanied by predictable sniggers, because at the time he was playing the role of a sex-obsessed writer on the TV show Californication. The 2007 comedy Blades of Glory made the issue its own punchline, with a sex addicts' support group meeting descending into a frantic orgy.

Some celebs have been back-pedalling furiously away from their supposed sex addictions. Musician Eric Benet went into sex-addiction rehab in 2002 but later told New York magazine: "In retrospect, it's not what I would label my situation".

Michael Douglas, who is habitually trotted out as an example of A-list sex addiction, has said that he "voluntarily went into rehab" because of a drink problem around 1990.

"Some smart-ass editor said, 'Oh, another boring story about an actor going to rehab. Let's give him sex addiction.'"

The message is that saying you're a sex addict isn't 'sexy' at all.

"There is a perception, even among our other clients here, that those who come into us with a sexual addiction isn't really as serious as a substance addiction like, say, heroin," says Dr Fiona Weldon, clinical director of the Rutland treatment centre in Dublin.

"It doesn't take long for that misperception to lift because they soon see how devastating it can be. Whole families are destroyed by it, whole lives."

She categorically insists that sexual addiction is real and that as a psychological addiction, it can be much stronger than an addiction to an external substance.

"Take nicotine, for example; it will leave the system in three or four days.

"Behavioural addictions such as sex or gambling can be so much more complex. It is not simply the addiction to the high of the sexual content itself. In most cases, the anticipation of the sexual act is what gives the greater high and it becomes more and more difficult to achieve that same high.

"People end up going to huge expense, effort and time chasing it, to the expense of everything else in their life."

Psychotherapist David Kavanagh points out that whatever you call excessive, repetitive sexual behaviours, we may be conditioned to think it's more normal than it is.

"Maybe pornography isn't actually harmless to your marriage, perhaps it's just an acclimatisation," he says.

"The sex industry has a huge investment in making us believe that going to a strip club for a stag night is harmless fun, but no one knows definitively if that is true."

For now, the spotlight remains on Tiger Woods. In his latest interview with ESPN, he may have given the key to his bad behaviour.

"And as I said earlier in my statement, I felt entitled."

A fit, wealthy young athlete with time away from the wife to succumb to the temptations laid before him: is that sexual addiction or opportunism?

Mean Mothers

Spare a thought on Mother's Day for those with a more complicated, and not entirely positive, relationship with their mum. (As per movie star Joan Crawford and her adopted daughter Christina, pictured left, whose disastrous relationship was chronicled in Christina's memoir, Mommy Dearest).
From yesterday's Weekend magazine in the Irish Independent.

MEAN MOTHERS real
By SUSAN DALY
Peg Streep says she was no more than three or four years old when she knew that her mother didn’t love her.

On that devastating note, American writer Streep opens her thought-provoking new book Mean Mothers. It is, she says, the story that no-one wants to hear. Maternal love is one of society’s sacred cows. The bond between mother and child is supposed to be pure and unconditional.

This is why occasional tales of extreme child abuse at the hands of a mother seem so shocking, so unnatural.

But it can be easier to write off a physically or sexually abusive mother as an evil anomaly than to accept that they are at the rather extreme end of a much larger number of mothers who indulge in hurtful behaviour.

Psychologist Rachel Harris has specialised in family therapy and parenting education for over 30 years. “Sadly, after years in practice, I have to report that there are more mean mothers than most of us would like to admit,” she says. “There’s a continuum from horribly abusive mothers to motherly saints, but there are plenty of mothers in the middle range who are unable to love or who say mean things to their daughters.”

In other words few of us, hopefully, can relate to the notoriously abusive childhood Christina Crawford says she suffered at the hands of her movie star mother Joan. As chronicled in her memoir Mommy Dearest – and portrayed chillingly by Faye Dunaway in the 1981 movie of that name – Joan Crawford’s monstrosity climaxes with the attempted strangling of her daughter.

Neither does it suggest that the occasional maternal criticism some might be familiar with – “You’re not going out dressed like that, are you?” – constitutes a bad mother.

The ‘mean mother’ behaviour Streep writes of is much more insidious. With her own mother, it was the absolute absence of an affectionate word or gesture during her entire childhood. Streep’s mother would admonish her for skipping as they walked down the street, “as though my joy was an affront to her”. She told Streep’s first boyfriend that while her daughter was pretty on the outside, she was rotten inside.
The isolation Streep felt as a child was compounded by the fact that her bruises were emotional, not physical.

“There was no reconciling the mother I knew – the one who literally shook with fury and missed no opportunity to wound or criticise me – with the charming and beautiful woman who went out into the world in the highest of heels, shining jewellery on her hands and neck, not a hair out of place,” she says.

“She flirted with everyone – even my girlfriends and later my boyfriends – and they pronounced her delightful. Her secret, and mine, was closely held; who would believe me if I told? So I didn’t.”

Now a mother of an adult daughter of her own and after years of therapy, Streep became interested in how other women have coped with the legacy of having a mother who made them feel unlovable.

Cathy, a book-keeper who now has her own 8-year-old daughter, spoke of how from when she was very little her mother would tell her that she was sure that the hospital had sent her home with the wrong baby. Sarah, an artist and writer who now lives 2,000 miles away from where she grew up, decided as a young girl that she would never have children until she could figure out how to raise them better than her mother raised her.

Her mother refused to acknowledge her presence, making her sit in a chair in silence every evening until dinner was ready. When the family moved house when she was five, Sarah’s mother threw out all her stuffed animals rather than pack them up.
“I replaced them with imaginary ones and, later, with imaginary scenarios about how my parents weren’t really my parents and that my real parents would come and get me someday,” she told Streep.

While many of the women Streep spoke to weren’t obviously neglected – they had warm clothes and enough to eat – emotional neglect is a common thread.
Eleanor, now a therapist in her 50s, says that the best word she could use to describe her mother’s treatment of her was “indifference”. The only question she ever asked Eleanor when she got home from school each day was what she had for her lunch.

“The predominant feeling between us was emptiness, which made me feel that I didn’t really matter or, worse, that I didn’t really exist,” says Eleanor.

On the other hand, there were mothers whose overbearing and overcritical attentions literally suffocated their daughters. Jane, now an architect like her father (something her mother thinks unladylike), says her mother still refers to the day Jane got engaged as “‘the worst day of her life’ for no other reason than that the man I was engaged to and later married didn’t fit in to her vision precisely”.
Landscape gardener Gwen was a very pretty child and believes that her mother, who never felt attractive, was jealous of the attention she received.

At the age of 99 and living in a nursing home, Gwen’s mother is still making her criticisms felt. “I came to visit and she introduced me to another little old lady who was so wonderful and my mother said, ‘This is my daughter Gwendolyn – her hair always looks terrible.’ The other poor woman just didn’t know what to say.”
While Streep is careful not to excuse emotionally abusive behaviour, she does point to research that many ‘mean mothers’ are themselves daughters of women who showed no attachment to their children.

Eliza is 38 and the mother of a 19-year-old girl. Her mother and grandmother were both distant to their children but it has made Eliza all the more determined to mother her girl differently. “I decided early on that I was going to be more affectionate, emotionally available, and closely connected to my daughter,” she told Streep.

Neither do mothers, as Streep says, “operate in a cultural vacuum”. Even in the developed world, she argues, there can be a subconsciously higher value placed on boy children than girls. The comprehensive Gallup Poll has been compiling statistics about American society since 1941 and each year has asked this exact question:
“Suppose you could only have one child: would you prefer a girl or a boy?” In 2007, 37 per cent preferred a boy, 28 per cent a girl, and 35 per cent said they had no preference.

These results have barely shifted in 66 years – that is to say that there has NEVER been an overall preference for a girl.

But most of all, says Streep, the tales of ‘mean mothers’ she has uncovered shows that the notion that all mothers automatically bond with their children is a myth. Even where post-natal depression is not the issue, some mothers don’t become maternal just by the simple virtue of giving birth. They come to motherhood with their own personalities and baggage. Daughters in particular, made in their own image, can push their buttons in the way that sons can’t. Jealousy and resentment are huge issues in some mother-daughter relationships.

So where are the good fathers in all this? Streep devotes a chapter to them under the title: ‘Heroes and Co-Conspirators’. Her own father embodied this dichotomy. He was Streep’s hero as a child, “he rescued me in important ways”, teaching her the value of education and taking her away from her mother’s hypercritical eye from time to time.

“On Sundays, he’d drive me to church school and pick me up after, when, away from my naturally thin mother’s watchful eye (she always had the two of us on a diet), we’d steal off to the bakery to indulge in anotherwise forbidden treat,” Streep remembers warmly.

But there was a limit to his protection: an overweight, balding man, he adored Streep’s beautiful mother. As Streep entered adolescence and began to stand up for herself, he would actively side with her mother.

Another take on the father who distances himself from a mother-daughter conflict comes from Dr Linda Nielsen. In the book Embracing Your Father, she identifies ‘maternal gatekeeping’ where a mother keeps a father away from a meaningful relationship with his children because she believes it to be her territory, even in situations where the father might actually be better equipped to be a loving caregiver.

But while parents might be quixotic creatures, surely siblings are bonded through their common experience of going unloved? Not necessarily says Streep. Her own brother’s arrival only left her more isolated than ever: “With the birth of my brother when I was nine, I saw that my mother could love a child who wasn’t me.”

Some of the women she spoke to in Mean Mothers speak warmly of the special bond they had with their siblings. Psychologists refer to the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ relationship in which siblings become each other’s caretakers in the event of parental cruelty or neglect. But this is only one outcome. Elizabeth, now 50, and her younger sister were both treated badly by their mother as children. They coped with it differently, one becoming wild and rebellious, the other trying to gain approval by being the ‘good girl’ and it drove them apart.

Even more poignantly, Jody tells how she was born about a decade after her two older sisters. Her mother wanted little to do with her unplanned daughter and her older sisters, far from filling in as surrogate mothers teased her with comments like, “Jody, why don’t you go play in traffic?”

Even had Jody’s sisters treated her more kindly, Streep argues that a woman who has not had a loving mother will always feel the absence of it in her life. Therapy will help, and she firmly believes that a mind can be rewired to accept that it wasn’t you, the child, who was unlovable – it was she, the mum, who couldn’t love.
Streep got to the age of 39 when she made the momentous decision to cut off all contact with her mother who has never changed, and at that stage believes Streep, never would. Years later when her brother called to say their mother was dying, Streep made the decision not to go see her. “I didn’t go and I have never regretted it,” she says, now 60.

While closure is the buzzword in therapy circles some mothers, it seems, are incapable of giving it. Gwen, mentioned earlier in this article, tells of how her mother told her she loved her one day towards the end of her life.

“I was so taken aback – my mother never hugged me nor did she ever really talk to me – that I turned and, without thinking or censoring myself, said, ‘Excuse me?’” recalls Gwen.

“She looked at me and said, ‘Your brother told me I was supposed to say that’.”

• Mean Mothers by Peg Streep is published by HarperCollins and is available for import from www.amazon.com

FAMOUS MOTHER-DAUGHTER RIFTS
TORI AND CANDY SPELLING
The daughter and wife of the late TV mogul Aaron Spelling have been estranged since Tori split with her first husband and eloped with her second, Dean McDermott. Later that year, 2006, Aaron died – which Tori has claimed she learned via text message from a friend.
The feud between Candy and Tori has since escalated into a series of very public and hurtful ripostes, traded on TV shows, Twitter and celebrity mags. Candy posted an open letter to her daughter on her website earlier this summer saying she wanted to work things out, “in private”.

JENNIFER AND NANCY ANISTON
Keeping the press out of your business is difficult enough without your mother letting them in for a look-see. Jen and Nancy fell out when Nancy spoke about her daughter on a tabloid TV show in 1996 and then tried to make amends by… er… writing a book about their relationship.
It took the breakdown of Jen’s marriage to Brad Pitt (Nancy wasn’t invited to the wedding) for the pair to get back on speaking terms a decade later. Jennifer said this year that “It’s ok. Things are now fine between us.” Although she did add that her mother had since moved from California (where Jen lives) to Colorado so perhaps distance makes the heart grow fonder.

MEG RYAN AND SUSAN JORDAN
This split was sparked by Meg getting engaged to Dennis Quaid in 1989. Mom didn’t approve as Quaid had a cocaine habit at the time.
Quaid overcame the habit and has come and gone from Ryan’s life, but mother and daughter are still estranged. Meg’s father Harry Hyra has called on her to mend bridges calling Susan “a good mother”, as has Susan’s second husband, who went on record to say: “There’s an element to Meg that is quite shocking. It is all steel and determination and ruthlessness.”
Sounds like there might be two of them in it.

DREW AND JAID BARRYMORE
Despite occasional reports of reconciliations, Drew said this year that she currently has “no contact” with the mother from whom she became legally ‘emancipated’ as a 15-year-old.
Jaid probably didn’t help the ET child star stay on the straight and narrow when she took a pre-teen Drew to clubs like Studio 54. Drew, of course, began messing with drink and drugs and ended up in rehab at the age of 13.

Text, lies and betrayal

Emotional infidelity - as hurtful as a sexual betrayal?

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/texts-lies-and-betrayal-2082590.html



By Susan Daly

Saturday February 27 2010

There is a tacit code when it comes to admiring a person who is not your partner: look but don't touch. It's probably best not to be caught looking either but, overall, the consensus would be that the occasional fantasy is all right -- as long as everyone keeps their clothes on.

When we think of love cheats, we think of secret trysts and illicit sex. However, the psychologists and counsellors who work at the frontline of relationship discord say that being caught in flagrante delicto is not the only way to betray your partner. Emotional infidelity -- becoming mentally intimate with someone other than your better half without taking it to a physical level -- can be just as fatal to a relationship's chance of survival.

The definition of infidelity is now as broad as Bill Clinton's interpretation of what constitutes a sexual act. Look at married radio and TV presenter Vernon Kay, forced to apologise on his BBC Radio 1 show this month for sending texts of an explicit nature to several women.

"Now this week, you may or may not be aware that because of some foolish and stupid decisions I have made, I have disappointed and I have let down a lot of people," said Kay. "To my family and everybody, I am very sorry." Clearly, his wife Tess Daly had been very hurt, even if Kay's spokesperson had stated as news of the first text broke: "Vernon has not cheated. He didn't sleep with this girl."

Kay himself had been a bit blasé initially about whether his sex texts were a form of infidelity or not. As he said: "I suppose it's like fantasy land, just words... I thought it was harmless banter and just larking around." KayGate prompted two interesting discoveries: one, that the emotional depths of bland Kay were even shallower than we had suspected; and two, that there is a real division in opinion over what constitutes cheating.

By rights, Ashley Cole should also be grappling with the definition of infidelity. His wife, Girls Aloud sweetheart Cheryl, was understandably not happy that picture messages of his naked bits had been sent to a model. Of course, as we know from Ashley, he lent the phone to a friend, who lent it to another friend, who found the pictures Ashley took of himself "larking about" in his hotel room and had forgotten to delete, and sent them on to this model as a joke.

So thankfully, there is a perfectly innocent and plausible explanation for the whole thing, but it hasn't stopped Cheryl apparently ending their relationship.

Keira Knightley addresses the same debate in an interview with this month's Elle magazine. Her upcoming film, Last Night, deals with a husband and wife who both find themselves presented with opportunities to cheat while away from each other for a night.

"When we were making it," says Knightley, "the arguments on set were just amazing about whether mental infidelity is better or worse than physical infidelity. There was a huge gender divide on the question. Every single woman said that mental infidelity is 10 times worse than [an emotionless physical fling]. And most men I spoke with said that it's the physical act that would be the ultimate betrayal."

If the genders are divided along these battle lines, it might explain Brad Pitt's reiteration last year that he and Angelina Jolie did not have an affair on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith.

He said their early relationship was "respectful" of Jennifer Aniston, which we are to take as meaning there was no hanky panky. Yet Jolie has made a point of saying that it will be nice for her and Pitt's children to "see a movie where their parents fell in love". There might not have been sex, but there were deep feelings.

"Affairs don't have to be sexual to be destructive," says Allison Keating, relationship psychologist at Dublin's bWell clinic. "A relationship is all about intimacy, sharing your hopes and dreams with someone. I personally would want my husband to come home and tell me about the big things of his day. That is the glue of a relationship -- confiding in each other the important things. If you're talking to someone else about those things, and pushing out your partner, that's not just a friendship."

That echoes the definition given by psychologist Shirley Glass in her seminal 2003 book, Not Just Friends: "The new infidelity," she wrote, "is between people who unwittingly form deep, passionate connections before realising that they've crossed the line from platonic friendship into romantic love. Infidelity is any emotional or sexual intimacy that violates trust."

The key message is that if an attached person feels the need to hide their interaction with someone outside the relationship, then they are aware that they are not being completely faithful.

Former US President Jimmy Carter told Playboy magazine back in the '70s that he had had "lust in my heart" for women other than the First Lady.

"I've looked on a lot of women with lust," he said, "I've committed adultery in my heart many times..."

"I've seen from couples down the years that literally a text was considered unacceptable," says Keating. "Some couples don't mind a degree of flirting; for others, it might mean the end. But the point is that a couple tends to be aware of the values they have set up within their particular relationship, and they know when they are crossing the line, even if they try to justify it by saying, 'It was just a text'."

Marriage and Relationship Counselling Service counsellor David Wheeler agrees that people are well aware when they have betrayed their partner's trust.

"We all have male friends and female friends, but there is a certain line that is drawn about what is appropriate and any reasonably intelligent person knows when it crossed."

He takes issue though with the notion that men take emotional entanglements more lightly than women. "Certainly the clients that I have worked with tend to have the same reaction when they discover that there has been that kind of non-sexual contact, but contact on an emotionally deep level," he says.

"The betrayed person feels cheated and angry, and the perpetrators of the betrayal use all the same justifications -- you weren't meeting my needs, it's non-sexual, I'm not doing anything wrong -- whether they are a man or a woman."

Research seems to suggest there's a lot of emotional infidelity going round. A study last year by the London School of Economics found that a quarter of mobile phone users had sent explicit text messages, and one in six used their phone to flirt with people other than their partners.

The ease of modern communication over the internet has made the e-motional affair more than a virtual reality.

Websites such as Facebook and Friends Reunited -- where England goalkeeper David James rekindled a love affair that started off online but cost him his marriage -- are being used to "live out fantasy lives" says Wheeler. He also cites internet pornography and sex chat lines as another form of betrayal because they create a sense of distance.

"Technology has certainly encouraged and exacerbated the situation," says psychologist Allison Keating. "People can be more inappropriate in text or email because there is one step of removal in it."

Some might say this type of 'virtual' infidelity doesn't cut it as a true form of unfaithfulness. That clearly isn't the opinion of the number of people upset enough about their partner's secret online and mobile phone activities to try their hand at a bit of DIY surveillance.

A Munster-based private investigator told Weekend that he has seen an increase in the number of people asking him to extract data from their partner's phones or laptops because they think they are exchanging inappropriate material with an outsider. "I do try to steer away from that because I don't want to get on the wrong side of the law, and it is difficult to prove when it's not a physical affair."

Another investigator, John Martin, runs the online spystore.ie which sells surveillance gadgets. "We are in a grey area in terms of our investigators doing that [he also runs a detective agency] so we leave it up to people to buy the gadgets -- and they do."

SIM card readers were immediately popular when the site was launched. "People send a text and erase it so their partner won't see it. What they don't realise is that most phones save these messages internally and a reader can fish them out."

Also popular is software that can be downloaded on to a computer and retrieve every move, password-protected or not, made on the internet in the previous days. "Parents use it to keep an eye on their children's safety on the internet," says Martin, "and some employers use it to check that their employees are not surfing the net when they should be working. But it's also used by people who suspect their partner is sending inappropriate emails to another person."

Perhaps we are not used to putting the label 'infidelity' on such subtle betrayal, but we are aware of it. In popular culture, the unconsummated love affair is one of the most powerful -- think Robert Redford and Kristin Scott Thomas exchanging lingering looks in The Horse Whisperer.

"The dangerous thing about emotional affairs," says counsellor David Wheeler, "is that they often lead to sexual affairs. Of the couples I have seen where there was a history of one partner getting close to a third party, there have only been four or five instances where that hasn't proceeded to the physical level."

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/are-you-having-an-emotional-affair-2082591.html
Clinical psychotherapist Ronald T Potter-Efron co-authored The Emotional Affair: How To Recognise Emotional Infidelity and What To Do About It. If you want to examine whether your own behaviour falls into the definition of emotional infidelity, he suggests asking yourself if you agree with the following:

* I would prefer having lunch/dinner with someone other than my partner.
* Sometimes it feels as though my friend can read my mind.
* My friend meets emotional needs my partner doesn't.
* I feel empty, lonely and desperate when I cannot contact my friend.

If you agree with the above, then you must ask, 'Is this friendship adding to and complementing my relationship, or is it taking away from it?'