This year marks the 109th International Women’s Day. The now universally recognized date first bore fruit after a 1908 march, where 15,000 women in New York City demanded shorter working hours, better pay and the right to vote. Clara Zetkin, a German Marxist theorist, activist – and all-round badass – pioneered the idea at an … Read more
Never boast to your children that you had seventeen occupations before your twenty-fifth birthday. I did so with my fifth child and it was a bad call. It relaxed him into not worrying about the aimlessness – in my view – of his life. I became the kettle calling the pot black. ‘Oh good’, he … Read more
1960s Belfast Sat in silence on the bottom step, with my knees tucked under my chin, I fit snugly inside a ray of sunlight which penetrated the dark hallway through a stained glass window above the heavy wooden door. In the four years since my father’s death, a vindictive, sombre air pervaded the house. Harbors … Read more
I yearn for Six Nations matches at this time of year. Despite my worthier self, I cannot take my eyes off a psychological drama and physical spectacle offering respite from interminable winter. The violence is terrible, but it seems life-affirming that these specimens can, for the most part, withstand the battering. At its best, it … Read more
Disregarding chronological order, this is the tenth episode of A Monk Manqué, Bob Quinn’s unpublished (unpublishable?) memoir A Monk Manqué, following A Monk Manqué – Prologue A Monk Manqué – Thaura Mornton Making Films Early Days in RTÉ Waiting for Colonel Ghaddafi Culchies – An Excerpt from A Monk Manqué Last Days in RTÉ – … Read more
Prokopyevsk, 1974 SNOW is everywhere. So much of it, that the whole world looks like an old black-and-white movie. Through the grey haze, a pale and tired winter sun tries to warm the frozen land but only succeeds in turning water crystals into some kind of sparkling fairy dust. Snow piles on double-sloped roofs like … Read more
2019 has taught us all we need to know about Mortality. So many writers, musicians, and actors that we loved passed away this year. Some left us far too soon and others bowed out with a fine stash of years under their wings. I suppose, all we can learn from this, is that our time … Read more
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film ‘Dr Strangelove’ dramatizes the still not-altogether-remote scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It begins with a deranged U.S. Airforce General, Jack D. Ripper, overriding Executive Command and ordering a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The Russians, unbeknownst to the Americans, have developed a deterrent – the Doomsday Machine – … Read more
We sent twenty questions to Maverick film maker Bob Quinn who published ten excerpts of his memoir A Monk Manqué with us last year. The featured image is of Bob Quinn meeting Colonel Ghaddafi in 1988 from one episode that can be viewed here. What advice would you have for your eighteen-year-old self if you … Read more
I was sickened to read a fawning obituary to an absolute creep and impostor Randal McDonnell. It fails to mention that he was a predator and pederast with an insatiable lust for young boys. He made a misery of my late teenage years and I carried for way too long the shame and guilt for … Read more