Roe McDermott

Dublin

Freelance Writer at Freelance

Creator Hag. Writer, Fulbright Nerd, Next Generation Artist. she/her. Burning the fucking myths to the goddamn ground. @irishtimes @hotpress @randrrated 🌈

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Articles

A kind man is pursuing me but I don’t want anything serious with him

6 days ago | irishtimes.com | Roe McDermott

I am a heterosexual woman in my late 20s. A complex medical history and patterns of self-destruction meant that in recent years, I isolated myself from others. More recently, though, I have been enjoying going out and socialising again, and for the moment, the superficiality of any resulting encounters with men suits me. However, I recently met someone who is very intent on pursuing a relationship with me. He is intelligent, kind, extremely polite and shares some of my interests.
Family fallouts: ‘I can’t describe the heartache of not having a relationship with my sister’

6 days ago | irishtimes.com | Roe McDermott

In the grand constellation of human relationships, siblings are ever-present and strangely overlooked. We may have shared bunk beds or fought over dinner scraps, yet as adults, sibling bonds can become emotionally charged, distant, or even estranged. “Your siblings are the people you’re likely to know the longest in your life,” says Dr Geoffrey Greif, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and co-author of Adult Sibling Relationships.
FILM OF THE WEEK: 28 Years Later - Reviewed by Roe McDermott | Hotpress

1 week ago | hotpress.com | Roe McDermott

More than two decades after 28 Days Later redefined the zombie genre for a post-9/11 world, Danny Boyle returns with 28 Years Later, a bold, ambitious, and deeply uneven third entry in a franchise that has never been content to play by the rules. While it doesn’t build directly on the threads left dangling by 28 Weeks Later - most notably that chilling final shot in Paris - Boyle and returning screenwriter Alex Garland instead opt for a soft reset.
FILM OF THE WEEK: Lollipop - Reviewed by Roe McDermott | Hotpress

1 week ago | hotpress.com | Roe McDermott

Daisy-May Hudson’s Lollipop is a fierce and necessary fiction feature burning with the truth of lived experience. In this impassioned story of one mother’s post-prison struggle to regain her children, Hudson lays bare the punitive systems that punish poverty, pathologise emotion, and criminalise the survival strategies of women who are already navigating impossible odds.
Roe McDermott: My fiance revealed he once had a fling with a man and I don’t think I fancy him any more

1 week ago | irishtimes.com | Roe McDermott

My fiance and I are to get married next year and I thought we knew everything about each other. But recently, during a drunken conversation about college flings, he blurted out something that shocked me: he had a brief fling with a gay friend during a post-breakup ordeal. I consider myself a very liberal and open-minded person, and I truly believe love is love, regardless of gender. However, I can’t shake this feeling that I’ve lost attraction to him.
‘I fell for the horny married man playing the nice guy routine’

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Roe McDermott

I met a man, we had a fling over a weekend. He had a ring, and I asked, but he told me he was divorced, then separated. Then this got a bit vague. Towards the end of the weekend he told me he had children, and also that as we lived a good distance apart, he didn’t see our relationship continuing. I was a little bit “WTF?” to say the least.
FILM OF THE WEEK: The Encampments - by Roe McDermott | Hotpress

3 weeks ago | hotpress.com | Roe McDermott

The Encampments, directed by Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker, is a lean, clear-eyed documentary that offers an essential account of the student protests that began at Columbia University in spring 2024 and rapidly spread across the United States. Grounded in the testimony of the young people who led the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, the film restores the voices of those who were often vilified or ignored in the mainstream coverage of the movement.
How women are using ChatGPT to make sense of men and fix their relationships

3 weeks ago | image.ie | Roe McDermott

Image / Self / Relationships Can ChatGPT tell you if he’s being weird? In search of sanity in a confusing romantic landscape, women are using AI to outsource emotional labour in an unequal system while men outsource their emotional growth to ChatGPT, writes Roe McDermott. A woman in Greece recently filed for divorce after consulting ChatGPT. Not a couple’s counsellor. Not a priest or a best friend or even a late-night Reddit thread. A chatbot.
‘Should I tell my wife that I’m a crossdresser after more than 20 years together?’

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Roe McDermott

Should I tell my wife I’m a crossdresser? I’ve kept this part of me secret since childhood and through our marriage. I really haven’t had much opportunity to explore this part of myself but it has always been there. Over the past year or so, I’ve bought my own clothes, make-up and wig and taken some time when home alone to dress. More recently I’ve found some community with other crossdressers online, sharing photos and chatting. I’ve enjoyed this sense of connection and recognition.
The Flats director Alessandra Celesia : “There’s so much trauma in the North" | Hotpress

1 month ago | hotpress.com | Roe McDermott

Director Alessandra Celesia discusses her new documentary The Flats, which examines the lasting social and psychological cost of the Troubles. There are places where history doesn’t just linger in the streets – it seeps into the skin and settles in the bones. In The Flats, Alessandra Celesia’s haunting new documentary, Belfast is one of those places. Set in the crumbling New Lodge estate in North Belfast, the film is at once a reckoning, a lament, and a kind of séance.