You enter here a taut quintet Where theorists can shift or shape How we make sense of market flow; How men and how it’s mostly men, Explain the ways our commerce works. No Flash of insight, more a slow Encroachment that in turn creates Our understanding how by stealth New certainties of common sense Construe … Read more
Today bottled spring water is an everyday drink, and sales run into the billions every year throughout the world. In polluted cities many inhabitants don’t trust the public water supply and use it only for washing. For relaxation and thirst quenching they are willing to pay for bottled spring water from their own country or … Read more
When discussing health these days, if we’re not dissecting the latest updates on the pandemic, we’re often focusing on nutrition and dietary choices –– or mental health and wellbeing. These are areas, after all, in which it’s possible to quickly implement practical changes. For instance, we can make easy changes to our diets, particularly with … Read more
It is coming up to one of the best times of the year; those early days of January following the sixth – a period I cheerfully refer to as ‘The Anti-Christmas’! Alas December has first to be endured. It is a month dominated by two types of people: those who project that the time is … Read more
Joe MacAnthony might be considered the greatest investigative reporter to have ever operated in the history of the Irish State. His career in Ireland, however, was cut short by vested interests that still appear to insulate those with money in power from accountability and criminal sanction. Having exposed the staggering corruption lying behind the Irish … Read more
It was one of those frequent blustery evenings, Wednesday May 18th, 2011. I was driving back to Rosses Point from Sligo town. In five minutes one could get soaked, as I had earlier and would after. The wind would blow like hell and clouds give the sky over to shades of light blue and grey … Read more
In a recent review, my colleague Ben Pantrey argues Richard Kearney’s Touch is itself out of touch with the ‘maddeningly Baroque … meme-ified soup of internet discourse.’ Given the Boston-based Irish philosopher is from an older generation, a relative lack of insight is perhaps unsurprising, but in dismissing the work in at times caustic terms, … Read more
Who Protects Landlords? It was about one in the afternoon by the time I reached 23 Prussia street. Earlier in the day I had received a group text saying: ‘Illegal eviction, Help Needed’! By then a human wall had formed outside the front door to Sunnyvale and the mood was upbeat. I was told the … Read more
To tell you the truth, I could easily have been a father, and I would be a father now, had my wife J not miscarried a baby we once made. This was in 2002, so he or she would have been eighteen by now. So strange to envisage it: another life – for me, for … Read more
Are you satisfied now, ladies and gentlemen, you counsellors and therapists of all stripes, with my do-it-your-self-psychoanalysis? Despite my disdain for the so-called misery memoir, it is time to declare: my childhood was better than being brought up in an industrial school, or by an alcoholic or physically abusive parent; but, certainly by today’s ideals, … Read more
My ear is pressed up against the past as if to the wall of a house that no longer exists. Richard Brautigan At 2pm on Friday the seventh of May, 1971, as Peter “Flipper” Groat coasted gently on his customized Triton 650 into the gravel car park to the rear of The Black Hand transport … Read more
Build me a cabin in Utah Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa” That must be what it’s all about That must be what it’s all about Bob Dylan, ‘Sign On The Window’, from New Morning (1970) When I was eighteen, during a summer spent working … Read more
The penny drops as I listen to RTE’s Liveline. There’s a highly articulate woman in her fifties, who is renting. Holding out little hope for the future, she pleads with the powers that be to solve the Housing Crisis, in its entirety, no more sticking plasters: “Solve it for everyone,” she stresses, “even if 50,000 … Read more
The noted American historian, and Putin critic,Timothy Snyder’s recent text Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty and Solidarity (2020) is a cri de coeur against almost non-existent healthcare rights in the U.S. – which the pandemic brought into sharp focus. The cossetted Yale professor saw the light, as his country failed to cope. Our Malady is … Read more
To understand the origins of the Irish Housing Crisis we also need to look beyond our shores, and excavate the substrate of the modern global financial order. This will reveal a slow journey towards the neoliberal financialisation of property as an asset today – overwhelmingly bought and sold regardless of the needs of society at … Read more
the perpetuation of debt, has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burthens ever accumulating. Thomas Jefferson, 1813. Laura’s Decision Laura has not found the job that will make her happy – more accurately, she does not want a job. Her vocation is reading, playing the cello, and, maybe, teaching. She is … Read more
I’m of an age to be intrigued by death. My 84-year-old grandmother, widowed, came to live with our family, and took over my bedroom. I was forced to give up the room, to share instead with a sibling. The old woman was hale and hearty, retained her wits, preserved her down to earth assessment of … Read more
Over the past few years, a broad consensus has emerged that in Ireland providing adequate protections for whistleblowing, and whistleblowers, is a lot more difficult to achieve in practice than in theory. In many fields, extreme real life consequences for a brave decision to go public with revelations of wrongdoing have been apparent. The protections … Read more
The appeal of exotic cuisines and esoteric diets has done little to diminish bread’s status as the primary foodstuff of the Western world, and many areas besides. Symbolic as the ‘staff of life’ and ubiquitous, the Oxford English Dictionary describes it in wholesome simplicity as a ‘well-known article of food prepared by moistening, kneading, and … Read more
I have a story for all kinds of weird sleep-related shenanigans. Walking, talking, singing, dancing, fucking, wanking. One of my earliest memories is of sleep misadventures. Waking in my parents’ bathroom, freezing cold, alone in the blue predawn hue. The long narrow room, icily humid like all 90s Irish lavatories, except filled with a fear … Read more
