Some years ago, a colleague on the Irish Times took the columnist Nuala O’Faolain to lunch. Nuala was famous, and feared, as a controversialist who specialised in attacking popular pieties, unless it was the pieties who were under attack, in which case she would spring immediately to their defence.
The pair had hardly finished their starters when the colleague, who had been in newspapers long enough to know better, heard himself asking Nuala how she managed to have so many opinions, enough to fill 52 columns yearly, as well as the odd special assignment. Nuala, cutlery suspended in mid-air, looked at him incredulously and said: “What are you talking about? I haven’t any opinions – I’m a journalist.”
