Eternal Return My sixteen year old daughter comes to me to complain about Patrick Kavanagh. O great irony, hardly are the words out of her mouth And I can see those fucking potatoes, The drills and the furrows of old bloody Monaghan! Why do we do it? Why does every generation get subjected To this … Read more
“It’s been two days. We gotta to do something. It’s gonna go rotten.” “I know. I’m thinking.” “About what we talked about?” “What?” “Get on the Great Ocean Road. Out past Martyrs Bay.” “Yeah. I know the place. Near the twelve apostles.” “We were there with Jessie that time, remember?” “Yeah, I remember. Alright. … Read more
What comes to mind in Ireland What is black? An absence of light, the cassocks of parish priests, dark peat in an Irish bog. What is brown? A leather belt, decaying plants, veins of iron in stones, the layered bark of a log. What is grey? Lowering clouds, skies threatening rain over windswept water, the … Read more
Ciara O’Donnell is an artist performing under the name of Domhan. She creates music inspired by her love of the Irish Celtic spirit, shamanism and Eastern spirituality. She is also a member of Irish band Bog Bodies a heavy folk rock outfit unearthing ancient Irish tribal tones and rich melody through an archaeological lens. Ciara … Read more
In 1977 Fianna Fáil Minister for Industry and Commerce, Desmond O’Malley, announced the government’s intention to build a nuclear power reactor at Carnsore Point, where the Irish Sea meets the southern Atlantic. Members of Cork Friends of the Earth, along with other groups and individuals, decided to oppose the idea. Four rallies by opponents of … Read more
Sé Merry Doyle’s latest documentary, Theocracy – the Emigrant’s Artist, serves as an excellent introduction to the stirring painting of Bernard Canavan. It offers an intimate portrait of a man whose distressing backstory has yielded extraordinary works of art that amplify our understanding of an appalling system that held sway for so long in Ireland. … Read more
Vitruvian Woman For Laura A Poem for Halloween Svelte limbs, aquiline and flow, her enjambment; The whole pelvic girdle hypnotically balances, Famously compared to a serpent which dances, And which has all full-blooded heterosexual males entranced…! And, there you have it! The Feminists declare, “No more male gazing here!” Where are we? How did … Read more
It’s always been a challenge to compress my life into tidy, coherent narratives full of hidden meanings and uniting threads with distinguishable identity signposts that give audiences an obvious sense of who this person is. My artistic identity has, in many ways, been an attempt to seek some form of ‘personal style,’ by tossing together … Read more
‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ – it takes a lot more than these kind of words today to get listened to, followed, and to exert influence and effectiveness over time. Effective change leaders remove barriers to employee success. Leaders of unsuccessful change tend to focus on results, and more often than not employees … Read more
Review: A Flower Travelled in my Blood: The Incredible Story of the Grandmothers who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children by Haley Cohen Gilliland. Between 1975 and the first half of 1978, it has been estimated that the Argentinian dictatorship under Jorge Rafael Videla killed and ‘disappeared’ 22,000 people. As far back as 1984, … Read more