My sister, the author

It turns out that I'm not the only member of my family desperate to inflict his or her views on an unsuspecting public. My Dublin sister has been moonlighting as a journalist for a few years, and now she's had a personal column published in the Irish Sunday Independent, detailing her sense of liberation and discovery of a new set of values after living as a classic Irish materialist hedonist for most of the last decade. She quit her job in the middle of Ireland's massive economic collapse and looks forward to a simpler life (funded by either unemployment benefit, cheques from the media, or possibly by her bloke, who is one of the loveliest blokes with whome you could ever down a pint).

How do I feel about this? Simple things first - I'm far from being a fan of that particular paper, and this kind of column isn't what I naturally turn to. Most of all though, I'm proud: the girl can write.

It does, however, raise some interesting points. Reading about someone I think I know so well is bound to be unsettling. It's like seeing a painting through an opaque window: the general outline is what you expect, but the details are unrecognisable. Why? Firstly, because we never truly know each other, whatever the relationship. How siblings (or friends) understand each other is shaped by the dynamics of our shared past - Maura and I are 4 years and a sibling apart (I have four sisters and a brother). We got on well as younger kids, then lost shared interests in the ensuing years, before rediscovering commonalities in the more recent past, despite - or because - not seeing each other very often. My memories and understanding of her, and hers of mine, can never fit the way we understand ourselves. Part of becoming an adult is letting go of these fixed prospects, of encountering our loved ones as they wish to present themselves, or as they are. The loss of shared experience is replaced by the richness of our separate lives - there's always something new to learn when we meet again, unencumbered (hopefully) by distant rivalries and resentments. Refounding a blood relationship in friendship is surely a significant moment.

Added to this, of course, is the plain fact that we edit ourselves for public consumption: the Maura Byrne bylined in this piece is a fictional construct, just as the Plashing Vole you see in the lecture hall, the pub or on a blog is merely a facet of a shifting collection of attitudes, beliefs, positions and cells. This isn't criticism, merely observation: the concept of the individual as a stable, discrete unit is a product of western rationalist capitalism - my take on it is simple poststructuralism. 'Maura Byrne' the journalist is no more and no less true than Maura Byrne my sister - and the demands on the columnist is that the art is closer to the surface.

The result is that, ten years ago, the Vole who read of his sister's 'voracious' consumption of culture and art would have scoffed and sarcastically offered an alternative narrative. The Vole of now accepts that these claims reflect a life I haven't recently shared, an interpretation equally, if not more, valid than mine, which of course reflects the tensions and experiences of childhood.

So - to my sister the author: congratulations and admiration.

Happy birthday, grandma!

I'm away for my grandmother's 96th birthday party - she really is immortal, which hopefully means that I'll live long enough to bore your grandchildren too. As it's a family occasion, we're all sitting in separate rooms, reading newspapers (siblings apart - illiterates all). I've just read the Irish Times, and it's a real pleasure. It's still a massive expanse of newspaper, still running pages of close-type small ads, and clearly limited in its global reporting (lots of wire-service pieces), but it's beautifully written. 

It's an odd paper. Formerly the voice of the bitter Ascendancy which took several decades to come to terms with letting the culchies run the country, it's become a sophisticated, largely liberal paper which takes a cool, disinterested (is this the character of Church of Ireland Protestants?), rather despairing long view of the vagaries of Irish politics and governance - a bit like the Guardian but without the slightly desperate attempt to be cool, probably because it's the paper of record with no serious competition. There's something delightfully old-school about a paper in which letters start with 'Madam' (editor Geraldine Kennedy) and end with 'a chara etc.' The paper seems suffused with the barely suppressed notion that, had it been consulted, the country wouldn't be in its current economic, political and moral turmoil - and it's probably right.

None of this applies, of course, to the Saturday supplements. Like the Guardian and all the others, they're obsessed with something called 'lifestyle', which seems to consist of consuming vast quantities of food while wearing expensive but ephemeral clothes. I hoped that, with a recession, this rubbish would fade away, but apparently not: the Guardian featured a man's shirt for £850 yesterday. I know that I'm a penny-pinching git, but this seems excessive. I can see the point of paying £5000 for bespoke suit that will last for an entire lifetime, but that much for something which will seem unwearably outdated in a few months' time just makes me incandescent with impotent rage. 

The Irish Independent is a bigger seller, but that rag is an hysterical, reactionary turd of a publication - much more like the Mail than its sister paper in the UK. I rather like the Examiner too - formerly the Cork Examiner, making a play for national status. Unfortunately, however, the British tabloids and mid-markets are muscling in on the market by adding 'Irish' to the masthead and sharpening their most stridently unpleasant views even further: they seem to believe that the Irish are even more insular and racist than their home readership. Say it ain't so!

I browse through other papers too: Libération, L'humanité and Le Monde sometimes, and struggle through a few in languages I barely recognise - good for the soul and brings a new perspective.