‘My partner and I gave each other a life interest in our house. But now he's seriously ill and I'm worried his children could force me out'
Today at 00:30
Query: My partner and I bought a house together a few years ago. We're not married, and between us we have children from previous relationships.
To try and keep things fair, we bought the house as tenants in common, and we both made wills leaving our share of the property to our own children.
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Irish Post
an hour ago
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The Ireland we carried with us
ONE of the most characteristic aspects of growing up Irish in England was that it was primarily happening in big English cities with parents who were from the countryside. That is that we were city kids, often inner-city kids, and our parents were invariably rural people. My father was born on a farm and grew up in a small village. My mother grew up on the edge of a city in a family of farm workers. I was born and grew up right in the heart of a big, industrial city. This meant too that when we went back to Ireland the contrast was huge. We came from concrete and streets to grass and lanes. It is hardly surprising then that Ireland imprinted itself upon us. If Ireland is still a rural place now it really was rural then. It looked different and it smelled different and it sounded different. Of course it stayed with us. How could it not? It is hard at this distance, after all these years, to figure out what impacted us most. Was it the Irishness in England we were reared in? Or was it the island itself? The physical island of Ireland as the boat sailed in or as the boat sailed out. I'd say our Irish upbringing was the fundamental aspect of our Irishness, and indeed this often seemed to exist independently of Ireland itself, maybe even despite Ireland itself. Yet, unlike a lot of other immigrant groups, unlike for instance our cousins in America, Ireland, 'home', was just over the Irish Sea. Going back was more than possible, even for working class families without loads of money. So in the formative years of our lives we piled out of harsh, industrial, English cities and we went to visit farms and lanes and star-speckled skies. And we were told that the place we were going to was 'home'. Yes, it really did have an impact. So this island, this small country, has loomed so large for so many of us. I've lived back here now in Ireland for twenty-six years, my children were all born and reared here, my father lies in a grave just down the road, and my everyday life is just that. It is an everyday life full of everyday things. Yet, still the huge significance of being here, the special something about this being Ireland, being that place, still strikes me. We recently had a visitor and though she's been here before she stopped and said this place is so. . . and then she hesitated for a while and said it's just so beautiful. Yes, there is the old truth, the old saying, that you can't eat scenery and the deprivation our parents left was very real and really wasn't very beautiful. But Ireland is beautiful and while there are many things wrong with it, it has a society that works. Where people, by and large, treat each other well. When you get to a certain age you realise that a lot of what you grew up with, and very sadly a lot of who you grew up with, is gone. It is gone and it is not coming back. The Ireland in England I grew up with has changed hugely. Time caught up with Birmingham and changed it in a way that I never imagined would happen. Well, I knew it would but I just never wanted to think it and in those days when there were so many of us and we were so vibrant it was easy to do that sidestep. Being back here in Ireland I have thought often of the Ireland overseas I was reared in and felt a sadness about the changes time had wrought on it. I thought too, correctly, of how much that vanished place, defined me. I was forgetting something though. I was forgetting this place. I was seeing it every day and I was forgetting it. Ireland too, Ireland itself, where they all came from, that they all talked about and all sang about. That's still here, changed and altered and still the same too, still here. I must remember that. Take a look around. It was only ever just over the sea. Ireland itself. Joe Horgan posts on X at @JoeHorganwriter See More: Birmingham, Immigration, Rural Ireland
Irish Times
an hour ago
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To be warned of death by a banshee was traditionally the privilege – a dubious one – of certain old Irish families. In his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1838), Sir Walter Scott summarised this as follows: 'If I am rightly informed, the distinction of a banshie (sic) is only allowed to families of the pure Milesian stock, and is never ascribed to any descendant of [even] the proudest Norman or boldest Saxon who followed the banner of Earl Strongbow, much less to adventurers of later date who have obtained settlements in the Green Isle.' He went on to note, however, that 'several families of the Highlands of Scotland anciently laid claim to the distinction of an attendant spirit, who performed the office of the Irish banshie.' This might explain one of the more famous reported occurrences, in Wicklow during the early hours of August 6th, 1801. The unfortunate subject of the banshee's services on that occasion was the Scottish-born aristocrat Robert Cuninghame, aka Lord Rossmore, a former MP and British Army officer, who lived most of his life on a large estate near what is today Newtownmountkennedy. READ MORE So either this was one of the Scottish associate-banshees, operating outside her jurisdiction, or it was a local one, making an exception to the usual rules. In any case, the event was supposedly witnessed not by the man himself but by his next-door neighbour: lawyer, judge and politician, Jonah Barrington (1756-1834). It thereby earned a place in Barrington's colourful memoirs, a bestseller of the 1830s and later. Although a great storyteller, the author was not the most reliable of narrators. But he was an entertaining chronicler of what were turbulent times in Ireland and his memoir was required reading for decades afterwards. In Ulysses, for example, James Joyce has the character Tom Kernan, walking near Dublin's Thomas Street and thinking about the 1798-1803 period: 'Times of the troubles. Must ask Ned Lambert to lend me those reminiscences of sir Jonah Barrington.' Of his various misadventures, Barrington described the banshee episode as 'the most extraordinary and inexplicable of my whole existence, an occurrence which for many years occupied my thoughts'. The occasion was the eve of one of Lord Rossmore's weekly summer parties, to which the neighbours were invited. Barrington went to bed at midnight but was woken just before 2am by a strange noise that 'resembled neither a voice nor an instrument'. It was 'softer than any voice, and wilder than any music, and seemed to float in the air'. His nerves jangling, he woke Mrs Barrington, who had somehow slept through it until then. She heard it too and initially thought it was an 'Eolian harp', an instrument played by the wind. 'My wife at first appeared less affected than I, but subsequently she was more so,' Barrington wrote. From a window overlooking the garden, they deduced that the sound came from a grassy area just below them. Then they called a maid, who heard it too and 'was more affected than either of us'. Eventually, the sound was accompanied by a 'deep, heavy throbbing sigh', followed by a 'sharp but low cry, and by the distinct exclamation, thrice repeated, of: 'Rossmore – Rossmore – Rossmore!' At that, the maid 'fled in terror'. Soon afterwards, half an hour after it started, the music stopped. Then the Barringtons went back to bed, struggling to make sense of the incident, but deciding to keep quiet about it: 'Lady Barrington, who is not so superstitious as I, attributed this circumstance to a hundred different causes and made me promise that I would not mention it next day [at the party], since we would be thereby rendered laughing-stocks.' But of course there was no party, because morning brought news that Rossmore – who had been the best of health despite his 75 years – was dead. His man servant had found him unwell at about 'half after two' and within minutes, 'all was over'. Bedroom terrors were a common occurrence in Wicklow then, it seems. Barrington had bought his own property, 'at a very moderate price', after the previous owner, the Countess Dowager of Mayo, left in a hurry. Just after the 1798 rebellion, she 'discovered a man concealed under her bed, and was so terrified that she instantly fled from her country residence … and never after returned'. That was a real man, we presume. But perhaps the banshee was politically motivated too. If so, she seems to have been implicated in manslaughter, at least. Aware that his story would raise disapproving eyebrows, Barrington sought to defend himself in advance against sceptics, placing the incident in the context of his religious beliefs and by extension his openness to the supernatural: 'Atheism may ridicule me, Orthodoxy may despise me, bigotry may lecture me, Fanaticism might burn me, yet in my very faith I would seek consolation. It is, in my mind, better to believe too much than too little , and that is the only theological crime of which I can be fairly accused.'
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