he video ‘was created to capture Brian’s deep knowledge of the craft, specifically the specialised stretching and table cutting techniques that modern machines simply cannot replicate…and serves as a visual record of a vanishing skill and an important piece of the cultural fabric of Dublin’. Continue reading
She brought ashore a language / and a pocketful of scraps: / a seagull nested in her mind / and she found shelter in a doorless house / that would let her neither in nor out / though she escaped in a dream / and saw before her a tribe / who reminded her of the dead Continue reading
Melbourne Hosts successful two-day symposium on Irish Language. Next is a review of Australian novelist and diarist Helen Garner’s How to End a Story, much appreciated by those of us who are Garner fans. ‘Priests in the Family’ provides Enright’s intriguing family connection to James Joyce, followed by an ‘Introduction to Ulysses’ where she talks about her personal experience of starting to read that famous book at the age of fourteen, ‘mainlining language, getting high on words’ Continue reading
‘Only Our Rivers run Free’, ‘It was a classic example of the right song, in the right place at the right time, recorded by the right artist, Christy Moore, because Christy’s career was taking off in a big way it afforded an authority and a whole importance to the song… Continue reading
Her final words are to the homeless and to those who become so because home is not safe: ‘To anyone trapped in a place that does not feel like home, and anyone who has ever been asked the question ‘why don’t you just leave?’ This book is for you. Continue reading
I have a wee reservation about the title. Neither the play nor the pub are a bit of a lark, in the sense of harmless fun. In my experience, pubs from the time depicted in the play were the pits. Continue reading
‘Have you seen the exhibition yet?’ Continue reading
Like Heaney, I too was catapulted back to the powerful impact of reading Wilde’s De Profundis, also penned in Reading Gaol, on me aged 20. Continue reading
Go see the movie for the breathtaking landscape and the solid acting of Gabriel Byrne and the young stars Anne Skelly, Fionn O’Shea, and Ferdia Walshe Peelo, Continue reading
The wicked history of ‘Monto’ spreads itself accommodatingly from the 1860s up to the 1950s. ‘Monto’ was, at one time, so it is claimed, to be the largest redlight district in Europe. It is estimated that there were at times up to 1,600 prostitutes working there. Continue reading
Tinteán 