frankarmstrong I was en route to Leitrim for a second time in a month when ‘Zooropa,’ the U2 song from the album of the same name, came on the stereo (a consequence of Spotify’s predictive algorithm). I hadn’t heard the song in thirty years, the year the album came out and I was a student working … Read more
It should be a source of embarrassment that in Ireland we still have had no public inquiry into the State’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite talk of terms of reference, nothing has materialized, and nor does this situation seem likely to change during the lifetime of new Taoiseach Harris’s government. The mainstream media, which … Read more
Bonus Episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-episode-ii-100102849 Or via apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep4-lockdowns-thinking-in-one-dimension-with-guest/id1728086643?i=1000648655188 In early 2020, Sunetra Gupta was quietly working on a universal influenza vaccine as Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, while finishing her sixth novel. By then, a new coronavirus had been discovered in Wuhan, China. In response, she and her group produced a paper suggesting, … Read more
Let no feeling of vengeance presume to defile The cause of, or men of, the Emerald Isle. From William Drennan’s ‘When Erin First Rose.’ (1795). The intense green colour of much of the landscape of Ireland – the so-called “Emerald Isle” – bears testimony to Garrett Hardin’s assessment that ‘As a rational being, each herdsman … Read more
Imaginative fiction offers invaluable insights into everything from national characteristics to institutional malaise and pathological violence. The musings of psychologists, philosophers and historians often appear clumsy and verbose beside the epiphanies that flow from the creative hand. Thus, the visions of long dead novelists continue to colour our understanding of who we are, and where … Read more
I sat for a while by the gap in the wall Found a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball Heard the cards being dealt and the rosary called And a fiddle playing “Sean Dun Na Ngall” lyrics from ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’ by Shane MacGowan. I wasn’t close to Shane – celebrity brings … Read more
The music was the code. It was the transliteration of the style. It was not giving a bollocks in a thoroughly musical manner. It was fuck this and fuck that and frankly fuck you. A rockety life came with the territory. You didn’t have to be Irish. Their England had been influenced by that Ireland … Read more
Dublin was the second city of the British Empire until end of the eighteenth century. After the Act of Union of 1801, however, many prosperous land owners departed the city and, indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century Belfast’s population was greater. The former did, however, retain a residual aristocracy who formed the clientele … Read more
The anthropologist Jack Goody pours scorn on modern dining habits. Solitary consumption he says reverses the customary habit of ‘public input and private output’, making eating alone ‘the equivalent of shitting publicly.’ Dining, after all, as the great gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, put it: ‘is the common bond which unites the nations of the world in … Read more
Julian Lloyd’s iconic portrait of Nick Drake now forms part of the U.K.’s National Portrait Gallery’s photographic collection. Lloyd’s friendship with the archetypal singer-songwriter, who died, tragically, aged just twenty-six in 1974, permits a rare intimacy between photographer and an elusive subject. In some photos Drake looks to be at peace with himself and his … Read more