Julia Molony News Today

About a third of Irish secondary school pupils are in single-sex schools. That they are not happy about such segregation is perhaps no surprise, for obvious reasons. But there are probably less obvious reasons at play too. Most young people, regardless of sexual orientation, recognise the value of everyday, routine exposure to peers of the opposite sex in terms of personal and relational development.

JK Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter series of books and, latterly, the world’s most high-profile critic of some aspects of the transgender rights movement, has doubled down on her long-standing feud with the young stars of the franchise — Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint.

The first Irish female to qualify as a doctor was a male.

Almost a quarter of six-year-olds in Ireland have their own smartphone. For those parents who want to hold out longer, the end of primary school seems to be, by an almost complete consensus, the last frontier. Almost no one risks attempting imposing an analogue ­adolescence on their kids.

Almost a year on from the end of the pandemic and we are only just starting to get to grips with the ­effects on the education sector. Despite the ambitions of the great reset in 2020, the problems both exposed and exacerbated by Covid for schools show little sign of abating.

There was Barry Keoghan, representing north inner-city Dublin on the world stage last week, thanks to his Golden Globe nomination for the film Saltburn.

After a US court order green-lit the unsealing of previously classified documents relating to the Jeffrey Epstein case, conspiracy theorists were expecting the big reveal of his ‘client list’ to be proof of an organised cabal of paedophiles controlling global politics.

France has, until recently, been a country that seemed relatively immune to the worst shocks of the culture wars. And yet in the last couple of years fissures of social and generational division have begun opening. And last week, the country’s commentariat divided around the totemic figure of Gerard Depardieu.

Sir — I am writing to you about a subject that, in my opinion, doesn’t get enough coverage especially at this time of year.

There’s a sense of comedic nihilism that has crept into my social media feed in the last few weeks. The algorithm clearly has my number, because it’s wall-to-wall mums giving out about the pressures that pile on at this time of year. The overall mood is end-of-year burnout, spiked with a good measure of hysteria and mulled wine.