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Dr Katriona O’Sullivan is an award-winning academic whose work explores barriers to education. Katriona’s journey to success is inspiring; she grew up in extreme poverty in the Hillfields, Coventry, as one of five children to Irish parents in a home shaped by her parents’ heroin addiction. Katriona faced incredible challenges from a young age and again when she became a mother aged 15 and ended up homeless on the streets of Birmingham.
Despite this Katriona was able to graduate from Trinity College Dublin via their access program with a first in Psychology, then receiving a scholarship from TCD to pursue her PhD. Today she leads the largest nationally funded project in the Republic of Ireland that aims to ensure all working-class girls have access to STEM education and employment. This is an extract from Katriona’s new autobiography, Poor…
I LOVED MRS Arkinson and I knew she loved me. Her eyes said so. The way she helped me said so. The pat on my head, the hand on my shoulder, the encouragement and rewards.
When Mrs Arkinson was pleased with you, well, you felt like you could survive forever on that small nod or pat on the head. It was like she pushed confidence into you.
One day in Reception she called me up and told me that Miss Hall was going to need to speak to me in the bathroom and that I was to listen to what she had to say and everything would be fine.
I’d seen looks between them already, just before I was called up, and I had my guard raised. I could always sense these things, the shift in the room when there was trouble brewing. My mind had instantly raced with excuses for things I’d done and for things I hadn’t done. I prepared for all eventualities, knew who I would pass the blame to, what I would deny.
Whatever I was accused of I would reject or ignore, and it would go away eventually. When Miss Hall came to get me, one of the other kids in my class said, ‘You’re for it now, Katriona O’Sullivan, whatever you done.’
When we got into the girls’ loos Miss Hall pushed open all the cubicle doors and then pushed the handle back on the main door, locking us in. It was very unusual so I figured I must be in terrible trouble. I stared at the floor and flexed my feet against the lino.
She rummaged in the bag she had brought with her. She took out a pile of white things and laid them out on the tiles. Small, folded girls’ pants, the way they are when you take them out of their plastic packet. She lined them up in a row.
Then I knew exactly what this was all about. Of course, I did.
Pissy pants.
I was wetting the bed every single night – children tend to do that when they are in crisis – and then going to school without washing or changing my pants. I didn’t know how to wash. There were no towels in our bathroom, barely any toilet paper. Never any soap. None of us owned a toothbrush.
In the toilets with Miss Hall I felt ashamed, as though it wasn’t just the kids who teased and mocked me.
‘Pissy pants, pissy pants.’
‘Smelly bitch.’
‘I don’t want to sit with Katriona, Miss, she smells like wee.’ I knew that Mrs Arkinson and Miss Hall thought I was smelly too.
It was true. I stared at the floor. Couldn’t she just leave me alone? I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
Miss Hall crouched down and said, quietly and kindly, ‘Katriona, you’re not in trouble, we are going to help.’ I did need help. I could sense it in the relief I felt from her words and looking at the pants. They had pictures of little girls in tea dresses on the front, and days of the week stamped above the picture.
‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,’ she said, landing her finger on each one as she said the word.
I looked at Miss Hall and she was looking at me. I wanted to reach out and touch her fluffy hair and silky blouse with the big loose bow at the neck of it. She was so clean and pretty and smelled lovely. I sometimes wondered if she could actually be Princess Diana, they looked the same to me. Maybe it was really her, a princess in our class.
‘When you come into school in the morning, before everyone else, I want you to come to my desk and I will give you a set like this.’ She showed me a white flannel and a white towel and lifted one pair of pants onto the small pile. ‘You take them and come into the loo and lock the door like I just did, okay?’
I didn’t nod or shake my head. I just stared at the floor. ‘Do you wet the bed?’ she asked, hunching to look up at my face. I flinched but didn’t answer. She pushed my hair back.
‘Head up now,’ she said, ‘nothing to be ashamed of, but let’s learn to keep ourselves . . . fresh and clean.’
There were three little sinks and she chose the last one, explained how to run the water warm and then showed me how to wash.
‘Start on our legs,’ she said after I took off my yellow stained pants. She threw them into the bin straight away. ‘Get the flannel wet in the warm water, then we twist like this so it won’t drip, and now we rub our legs like this.’ She showed me how, up and down from my knees.
The way she kept saying ‘we’ felt nice. I was never part of a ‘we’.
‘Head up, Katriona,’ she reminded me. ‘Nothing to worry about, we are learning how girls wash.’ She wiped across my groin and around my hips and bum.
She showed me again, ‘Up and down, wash wash wash, around and under,’ and asked me to show her how to do it myself. I did, repeating the words as she said them.
‘Then dry like this,’ she said, patting my skin and giving me the towel to repeat the action myself.
‘Now pop on your Monday pants,’ she said, handing them to me.
She repeated my new routine: I was to come in every day and use the girls’ loo to wash like she’d shown me and put on my new pants. She would keep the pants in school and every morning she would give me the bundle of flannel and towel, and a pair of pants.
My used pants went back into the little bag; there was a small stand in front of the cubicles and she showed me where to leave the bag when I was finished.
I never thought about what happened to it after I left with my clean pants on, but of course it was making its way to Mrs Arkinson’s washing machine and back into school for the following week.
I stood there in clean pants, with clean legs.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘what a great girl.’
I felt as though I was standing in a beam of sunlight. She will never know what she did for me, how in that small bundle of towel, flannel and pants, Miss Hall gave me power. In that small bathroom every morning, before the other girls came in, I was in control of one thing.
Today Dr Katriona O’Sullivan is an award-winning lecturer whose work explores barriers to education. Despite her professional success, and happiness in her marriage and as a loving mother, Katriona lives with the indelible legacy of poverty. Her new book, Poor is a stirring argument for the importance of looking out for our kids – on an individual, governmental, and societal level – of giving them hope, practical support and meaningful opportunities.
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Hope Sleepy sees headline.. World..
We are responsible for 0.01 % of global emissions. Yet we are taxed disproportionately to poverty. Greens need to be made extinct.
@Davy: I think carbon taxes amount to something like 450 euros per person per year. This is the reason you’re broke?
@Davy, yeap, Greens will try get us as much out of us as they can, before they get the boot in less than two years.
@Davy: Even if anthropic climate change could be unequivocally proven not to exist and even if CO2 were proven to be massively beneficial to the planet we would STILL need to stop burning fossil fuels for two very good and very obvious reasons.
1:They’re going to run out sooner rather than later.
2: The pollution from them is causing us direct harm.
The traffic congestion in Galway which is caused by the green partys efforts supported by gcc to get everyone on to bicycles by installing more and more traffic lights throughout the city and also being denied a hugely important city bypass has driven everyone’s carbon footprint sky high .. these muppets are causing the problem with their ideals
@Mark Costello: and still, Galway and surrounding towns have abysmal cycling infrastructure.
Housing developments and road schemes have been built in recent years (and still being built) without any cycling infrastructure.
A massive new Garda station, built out to the road and obstructing a bus set-down stop, blocking any chance of a badly needed cycle lane, built across the road from a 3rd level college where students travel 100-200km daily round journeys because of the absence of accommodation.
But more Talk & Tax will sort it!
The UN officials and the G20 leaders should lead by example and not use their private jets to get to Dubai for COP28 before they start preaching to the rest of us.
@john dennehy: Steve is a crook, so I’ll be a crook. Mary is a racist, so I’ll be a racist. Rich people behave badly, so I’ll behave badly.
Waiting on others to be perfect before you worry about your own behaviour is really just a cop out.
@Chris O’Brien: Is there any reason we should give any support to hypocrites though, Chris?
That would only encourage more of such behaviour.
@ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere: I’m not interested in supporting hypocrisy, but… at the end of the day people pointing out the hypocrisy in question aren’t doing it in the spirit of “they’re a hypocrite, but I’ll still do my best,” but in the spirit of, “why should I do my part when [person x] doesn’t”.
This leads to no one doing anything, but blah blah blah.
I agree the rich and powerful should get off their jets. We all should. And we all should do our part. But at this point, no one is doing very much at all BECAUSE no one is doing very much at all. It’s a vicious cycle.
I behave the way I choose to behave, because it’s what I believe to be right, etc. Not because of what someone else does.
And Jazes, this bit of hypocrisy here is surely almost nothing in the scheme of things.
“I don’t help drowning children, because I saw a movie once where a dog drowned and during the movie, someone spilled a drink on my shoes.”
A tragedy yes, but relative to drowning children? Not so much.
Instead of looking for more excuses to do less and expect more, we should try to be less cynical, as best we can, for the sake of our kids and their future.
@Chris O’Brien: *expect less
@Chris O’Brien: @Chris O’Brien: Well, if we ignore bad behaviour then not only will that encourage more bad behaviour from the same types, but it will have a corrosive affect on all of us.
@Chris O’Brien:
The only people who can be racist are those who believe in ‘races’. Whether as an accuser or a proponent, a racist is a person who lacks common sense and can’t identify racism, racist, biracial, multiracial as prejudice with one no better than the other.
@Gearoid O’Ceilleachair: your claim here is that anyone that believes in the concept of race is a racist?
I’ve had the pleasure of being to the African continent quite a few times and climate goals don’t exist in this lovely spot!
@: The average emissions of the bottom 50% of the worlds population are nearly four times lower than the global average, most of which would reside in African countries, middle economies like India and China are actually the largest pollutants due to mass heavy industrialisation.
Nobody listens to the UN climate scaremongering anymore, as an organization they are a money pit jobs for life lot,
When they think they are being left behind they raise their heads and come up with more climate scaremongering, they will have to think of something else to get attention.
Does this website honestly think seeing articles like this, after Ireland is being taxed to death to be green and people are struggling as it is, really helps?
If anything It’ll make people care less because our tiny country has minimal impact at a global scale.
Isn’t it amazing that the solution to climate change is to make people poorer and a huge transfer is money/wealth from middle income earners to the rich… I can guarantee you 1000s of people in Europe will die from the cold because of the increasing cost of energy
@Washpenrebel: You’re absolutely correct. The you-and-me are being targeted because the climate change exploiters don’t give a damn. It is possible however to be pluralistic. It is possible for example to accept that climate change is a major threat but that blaming the populace is wrong. Nobody is going to stop me doing my weekly trash burn; not even those ones who say; “how could you? you’re a philistine” until the 75% co2 output from the global multinationals is dealt with it.
Personally, I refuse to follow orders until the multinationals take it more seriously. I’m a bit of a nihlist anyway so I don’t think it really matters when the human race is wiped out.
@Washpenrebel: That’s called capitalism.
“A WORLD FACING catastrophic climate change is perilously off course in meeting goals for slashing carbon pollution”
Yep China are going gang busters with the coal fired powered stations. Indian are having a good crack as well. It is bringing large parts of their populations out of poverty.
I would say the amount of funding for scientists and main stream media in China or India to get on board the band wagon that humans actually control the climate on the 4.5 billion year old planet rather than mother nature is not quite there yet
@Gregory Daniel: China would say that they are not responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, nor the scale of the global warming that has been the result.
They would further add that why should they not be allowed to brings their people out of poverty just because they began developing their industry and economy later.
They believe it is up to those that have been most responsible to bear the brunt of the cost.
Valid points, I think you’ll agree.
Apparently China has committed to reaching its peak carbon emissions by 2030 and to be carbon neutral by 2060.
Is China right to proceed as it is?
I really don’t know.
The will isn’t there to solve this problem. End of story.
Ban private jets and cruise and pleasure boats and then I’ll take it seriously for my own life. Otherwise it feels like a money making scam that the rich are conveniently getting away with contributing to.
Climate talks in the middle east where there is a lot of oil interest… hmmmm
Ireland adds Nothing but a drop of squirt, compared to America, India and China. STOP saying IT’S the World, because quite simply… It Isn’t!!!
I’m willing to give up my car, move to a 10 x 10 apartment, and eat insects if it means the planet temp does’nt go up by one degree. Who’s with me?
@casio shock: yer on your own, Sorry.
@casio shock: I don’t own a car. My wife and I live in a one-bed apartment and 2 billion people across the globes regularly east insects, so it’s not too much of a leap for me. I’m in.
Now let’s go to the comment section to what Anto, retired forklift operator, has to say on the matter
@Mr Sparkle: or lets go to comments section and listen to a fella calling himself mr sparkle talking Shiite
Climate change is a given…but for how long or will it change direction…..and does anyone have some distrust of the UN or am I alone ?
Note to the Saudi combustion industry.
‘All the jabbering on about the need to stop burning stuff while increasing the rate of same, is just a load of hot air’.
Great to see all the climate change deniers on here with the pop science. No interest in chemistry class but f@$k me YouTube will tell you everything you want to hear.
@Louis Jacob: I doubt they are deniers they are just fed up with all the constant climate scaremongering and carbon taxes that is proven to simply not have any effect on climate change, just look at Canada carbon taxes have achieved nothing regarding climate,
@Edward O’T.: Pricing carbon pollution is working in Canada. It is encouraging industries to become more efficient and use cleaner technologies, and it is spurring new and innovative approaches for cutting pollution, using energy differently, and saving money.
@Tom Dillon: You are obviously completely out of touch with what is happening in Canada, absolutely clueless.
The next government in Canada will b conservative and the carbon taxes will be gone because they do nothing for the environment and only contribute inflation and higher cost of living,
So wait lad and you will see this next election in Canada.
Fxxx UN and climate warming scam
Turn what way people will, they will always be subject or victims of a late 17th century conclusion that kicked off empirical modelling yet defies common sense.
“It is a fact not generally known that, owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time, the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are 24-hour days in the year” NASA /Harvard
Thanks to the Journal for allowing me to be economical at the expense of being more expansive.
@Gearoid O’Ceilleachair: Really? Another new account? Still not understanding the leap year?
@Diarmuid Hunt:
You should watch the rugby World Cup where men (and women) are competitive and observers enjoy the results of that competition. I would, too, as the first person to explain how we get an extra day and rotation next year on Feb 29th using the motions of the Earth. It amounts to a proportion of daily rotations to orbital circuits.
In this case, 1461 rotations for 4 orbital circuits (including the Feb 29th rotation) representing 365 1/4 rotations in proportion to one orbital circuit of the Sun.
It is fun even for those who are normally dull. There is no pretence in me as I so admire what our ancestors did, unlike the misadventure with timekeeping which constitutes scientific method modelling.
If this really is the case,then there needs to be a serious attempt to reduce the rate of population growth;
but try telling people that they don’t have a God given right to have as many kids as they choose…
No sht!!!!!!!!!
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