Shaking Beyond I’m playing with Ned on Thursday. That evening in the National Concert Hall will be the first time we meet. How strange that we’ll share some food together and follow that with as deep a conversation as I’ll have with anyone this year, to an audience of friends and strangers alike. The … Read more
The CASSANDRA VOICES MAGAZINE CHRISTMAS GATHERING will take place at TAILORS’ HALL, Back Lane, Dublin 8, on FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13th from 8PM. Tailors’ Hall is the oldest surviving Guild Hall in Dublin, and has been at the heart of the city’s cultural life for over three hundred years. Fittingly, this was a meeting place of … Read more
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”60″ gal_title=”Featured Artist of the month: Doireann Ni Ghrioghair”] There is many a country that has decided to establish a capital city with grandeur, efficiency and unity of the central government. In ancient times, urban planning was pursued in Egypt, in a large number of cities in China, Greece and Rome. There are examples … Read more
The Steadfast-Starry Sky in the Shannon Do you remember last year when the weather was nice for ages? Six weeks of sunshine and warmth. There hadn’t been a picture-book summer like it. Not since 1995. I wasn’t living in Ireland in 1995 but still I know all about that summer. Sometimes, during a relentlessly … Read more
What is it they say about going bankrupt? Slowly at first, and then all at once. As we crossed the precinct yard and I saw the scale of the operation in real terms, the vehicles crowded into rows, still more throbbing outside, as I heard all those boots, I knew the slow part was coming … Read more
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George Orwell has never been unfashionable, and is in vogue now more than ever. His writing, best represented by his many essays on a variety of subjects, rather than the more celebrated novels, presage in myriad ways the problems we face today. Those famous novels 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) are visionary works depicting … Read more
Numinous Soup is an album I quietly made by myself in my spare room on child free evenings, releasing mp3s on Patreon as they became ready and eventually combining my favourite tracks into this collection. ‘Mindsomereve’ is something I made almost absentmindedly, and didn’t think was finished, but as I kept listening to it to … Read more
The Resistance I never knew what they really felt how they survived the one world we shared across layers of fear and indifference never grasped the bold grip of hatred that sears the eye and numbs the mind of the last shreds of decency never expected that the good would outlast all this in a … Read more
It’s the grease that makes the economic wheels turn. But ask where your taxes go after you pay them; or how a bank makes a loan; or what it means when you hear central banks are ‘printing money,’ and you’ll get different answers depending on who you talk to. Why should you care? Because a … Read more