Jennifer O’Connell: how the climate changed in 2014

Last year, I rang in the new year from the balcony of my home, which overlooks (well, if you stood on a chair and craned your neck at an unlikely angle) Sydney Harbour Bridge. This year, I’ll mark it in our new home in the Santa Cruz mountains in California, in a village surrounded by redwoods and vines. In the space of 18 months, we’ve swapped our Dublin address for an Australian postcode and then a US one, and our family has grown from four plus a cat to five (the cat decided she was too old to emigrate). So this has been a year I’ll remember for lots of reasons, not just because of my family’s determination to work our way through the Holmes and Rahe scale of the 43 most stressful life events.

Stories with global impact 

Every year, there are the big stories with global impact that resonate on every continent – the stories you will always remember where you were when you heard about them: the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the downing of MH17 or the death of Robin Williams. But the stories you experience close up tend to be the ones that take hold of you. For me, they included being in San Francisco during the Ebola hysteria and the Black Lives Matter protests, which took place in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting at the hands of a Missouri police officer. But the news story that finally, belatedly, became real to me was climate change. For the first time, I saw it unfold with my own eyes: late last year during the bushfires that turned the sky behind the Sydney Opera House pitch black, and this year during the drought that returned swathes of the California landscape to desert.

Water and other Irish matters

Water was a theme in Ireland too, and the subject of an ongoing conversation that, for those of us who live in places where paying for it is an accepted fact of life, was bemusing (especially when my first California water bill came to more than $700 for three months’ use). Watching events unfold at home from half a world away, some of the things I saw were truly heartening, like the growing acceptance of the inevitability of marriage equality. But other stories preoccupying the news media this year brought a depressing sense of deja-vu: we still can’t seem to get our heads around the fact that having the fastest-growing property market in Europe is not a proud boast. There was a dull predictability to the decades-old debate about the “rights of the unborn” even if this year it was at last joined by conversations about the rights of the born – children conceived and carried to term through IVF or surrogacy.

And some stories that gripped the Irish public belonged to the “you probably had to be there” category. Seriously, what was that thing with Garth Brooks all about?

Women, sexuality and violence

Globally, many of the year's most talked-about stories shared a common thread about women, sexuality and violence. There was the celebrity nude photo scandal, which was memorable mostly for the robust response of Jennifer Lawrence; the sexual assault allegations that swirled around Woody Allen in January and Bill Cosby in November; and the accompanying conversation about rape.

Feminism goes mainstream: For me, this was also the year that the debate about what feminism means in 2014 went mainstream, along with a lot of discussion about what today’s women want. It turns out that one of the things we want – aside from the obvious, such as equal pay, being able to live our lives without fear of assault, being granted the right to control our own fertility – is for the rest of the world to mind their language around us. So don’t call us aggressive when we’re being assertive; don’t call us a “bitch” if what you mean is “powerful”. And please don’t suggest it’s up to us to protect ourselves from being raped.

Trolls gonna troll

On the internet, trolls continued to troll. The novelty of “no make-up selfies” and ice-bucket challenges wore off quickly. But the award for the worst use of social media goes to all the punters who took selfies in tasteless settings – carrying out surgery, beside a car crash, at Nelson Mandela’s funeral (not your finest moment, Obama), and most recently, in front of the Lindt cafe during the Sydney siege.

Quantified selfing

This was the year I was introduced to the notion of "quantified selfing" – the practice of recording every aspect of your life on your smartphone – and what the Germans call Sehnsucht, the sense of loss over all the other, more worthwhile things you could have been doing. It seems to me the more connected we become and the more outwardly extrovert and narcissistic we seem, the more alone we feel.

Irish grace

In August, when I flew back home for a family funeral, I had the chance to remember why it is that, wherever I live and however I feel about the grimy streets or the State’s refusal to allow women control of their own sexuality or our property obsession, Ireland will always be the first place I think of when I think of home.

Being back there during my mother-in-law's funeral gave us the opportunity to see a quality of the Irish that we never noticed before: something I described at the time as a kind of grace. It is not a quality you'll see flaunted in guidebooks or taught in schools, but it is real and palpable and it's there when you need it most. Happy new year, Ireland.