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
Aged sixteen, I started trading sex for meth. There was no discussion about this with the drug dealers. It was understood. To me, this was a natural progression. My stepfather began to gawk at me when my first breast bud appeared, then molested me when I was twelve. Until I left home for college, I … Read more
Hats On for the Happy We couldn’t go in person since the car had grown moss inside. So we sat on Zoom in Birmingham, between a Dublin screen and one in the south of Chicago. We were silent, serious. Our separated frames fused to witness the in-person rejection of otherlessness. Two Canadians entered the gallery, … Read more
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. James Joyce, in ‘Nestor’, from Ulysses (1922) If there is any substitute for love, it is memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.’ Joseph Brodsky, in ‘Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) An Obituary’, from Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986) One of the … Read more
To celebrate International Women’s Week, The New Theatre is presenting ‘Feathers for Rosa’ by Noël O’Callaghan and Douglas Henderson—an unusual tribute to Rosa Luxemburg. Centring on the poem ‘Du liegst | You lie’ by German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, it consists of a thirty-minute performance interspersed by three original songs. There is also an exhibition of … Read more
A Poem for Refaat Alareer In the poem your butchers fear to breathe, the murdered nurseries are clean, the brimming table-top restored – your every room aflush with idleness again, a bowl of flying spices near to hand, the oven-bread uplifted through the haze: a feast the windy air will sing from the open-hearted balcony … Read more
This article is dedicated to Patrick Healy. The Irish people have a long-standing relationship with ‘numinous presences in the landscape’, often referred to as the little people, or faeries. The literature provides a complex set of illusions. The writer, philosopher and independent scholar, my friend, Patrick Healy on a recent visitation tendered me a painting … Read more
We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered non-stop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President. Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York (2018) I doubt there are many career guidance counsellors now advising school leavers to become journalists. … Read more
In contrast to other major European cities, Dublin has few rail- or tram- lines. Instead, public transport users mainly rely on an extensive but complicated bus network. This is, however, slow and unreliable, owing to Dublin’s appalling traffic congestion. Moreover, for several key destinations outside the centre, notably Dublin Airport, buses are the only available … Read more
“You have no appointment.” I’d emailed, left messages, and read their mission statement: To free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. No. I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m doing it. Walking downtown to the office of The Innocence Project in Manhattan. On my … Read more