Dublin’s Forty Foot over Fourteen Years
For the past fourteen years I have been a daily swimmer at the Forty Foot…
Browsing: Society & Culture
Mother and Baby Home ‘Whitewash’ Compounds Victims’ Torture
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious…
Roll Model: Dervla Murphy
Dervla Murphy’s father was one of Pádraig Pearse’s patriots. Schooled in St Enda’s, aged eighteen…
The Ballad of Sadie Bramwell
This was back in the days when boys were still called Osmond or Norris, and…
Love Denied: Baudelaire’s Une Charogne
Une Charogne (1859) is among the most important poems of the 19th century, containing all…
Meeting Ingmar Bergman
I had second thoughts about boarding a plane to Stockholm to meet Ingmar Bergman twenty-four…
Christmas Traditions Old and New
Ostensibly, Christmas is the occasion when Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ; its origins,…
The Algorithm of Evil
The story of subliminal messaging follows an interesting evolution, one infrequently told about a technique…
Reform or we are Scrooged
Often dismissed as ‘worthy’, but perhaps overly wordy, products of the nineteenth century, the novels…
A Curious Irish Disregard for Historic Buildings
Under normal circumstances tourists flock to Ireland for its rich cultural inheritance and traditions. Indeed…
Aye, Dead On
It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted. Aeschylus…
Finding Alexandr(i)a: : a Creative Journey through Plutarch, Cavafy, Leonard Cohen and Laura Marling
Around the beginning of the second century AD, the Greek writer Plutarch unknowingly created the…
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Lockdown measures remind me of the prescription of anti-depressants and other psychiatric medicines. They are…
Looking Back on Lockdown
With lockdown actively under consideration in some European states once again, including Ireland, we look…
‘If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere’
2019 was a great year for me, my first book was published and had a…
Cuba Libre! At Home with Ronan Sheehan
Last week Andrea Reynell met renowned Irish man-of-letters Ronan Sheehan in his Dublin home. They…
The Rise of the Machines
‘Hey Siri, how will AI impact the Future of Work?’ If you have already worked…
The Horse That Kicks
For Daniel and Others ‘Is Heroin still a thing in Dublin?’ The academic, and Professor…
The New Abnormal
The pandemic has changed life as we know it. We are dealing with the ‘New…