Why did Catherine Kenny and her best friend die in the same doorway?

-

Catherine Kenny 1983-2016: Catherine needed treatment for addiction and mental health issues. Instead, she became Northern Ireland’s first known synthetic cannabinoid victim

The day after Catherine Kenny suffered a seizure in Belfast city centre in March 2016, she woke up in hospital. The first person she saw at her bedside was her sister Lee-Maria Hughes, who had been there for her all her life. “I said to her: ‘My God, sweetheart, what am I gonna do with you?’” Hughes says. “She just opened her eyes and said: ‘Will you help me? Please help me, I need help.’” She had never asked for help before.

Kenny had battled alcohol and drug dependency since her teens. Eventually, it had led to her sleeping rough on the streets of Belfast. Over the next few days, Hughes tried desperately to get her sister into rehab, but she did not succeed. Five days after her seizure, Kenny died alone in the doorway of a derelict shop just metres from Belfast’s magisterial City Hall. She was 32.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MTyUdI

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ply in the sky: the new materials to take us beyond concrete | Fiona Harvey

-
Concrete is everywhere, but it’s bad for the planet, generating large amounts of carbon dioxide. Creative alternatives are in the pipeline They call them plyscrapers: the sudden emergence of tall buildings constructed almost entirely from timber. Vancouver , Vienna and Brumunddal in Norway have all claimed recently to have the tallest wooden building in the world, and now Tokyo has its own designs on the informal title. Related: Share your photos of beautiful or ugly concrete Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2UeDOmU
Read more

Forgotten plays: No 5 – Owners (1972) by Caryl Churchill

-
The writer unleashed her gift for black comedy to excoriate British attitudes to property and possessions in this sprightly drama Caryl Churchill is rightly admired for many qualities : her formal inventiveness, her questing intelligence, her dystopian vision of everything from cloning to climate catastrophe. But she has one gift that is rarely discussed: her wild humour. It is there in the sudden eruption of a 10-foot bird into the family brouhaha in Blue Heart (1997) and in the backyard banter in the more recent Escaped Alone (2016). It is also vividly present in one of her earliest stage plays, Owners. Given that the piece had a brief run at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1972 and, as far as I know, only one revival, it is one of Churchill’s least-known works yet cries out to be rediscovered. On the surface, it sounds bleak. It is about the urge for ownership and shows Marion, a rampant property developer, eating up everything around her: she’s not only prepared to turf two...
Read more

The 20 best songs of 2020

-
Our writers considered hundreds of contenders – and here are their picks of the year. Listen to all 390 tracks they voted for on our playlist Delivered from a nightmare: why our No 1 song works so well We kick off our end of 2020 music coverage with Guardian critics’ favourite songs, with our album of the year countdown starting tomorrow. As ever, each critic votes for top 20 songs and albums, with points allocated for each placing, and those points tallied to make these lists. There were 390 songs voted for in all – we’ve put ( almost) all of them in a Spotify playlist . Please share your own favourite songs of the year in the comments below, and we’ll hopefully see you in a festival field in 2021 … Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3liPlhp
Read more