A few years ago, I had occasion to walk regularly past the university in Galway. My journeys took me across the Salmon Weir Bridge, which had narrow footpaths and has since been relieved by a new footbridge, and up past the cathedral and the university. Often, I found myself walking against the current of students … Read more
Patrick Freyne’s satirical 2020 Irish Times article ‘It is now late-period Dermot Bannon. He is on the verge of losing it’ was an unusually humorous appraisal of the kitsch that state broadcaster RTÉ tends to dollop out. In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Czech author Milan Kundera explains that kitsch is an aesthetic … Read more
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster… when you look into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you. Friedrich Nietzsche Day 1. On the question of the one against the many, as opposed to the many against the one, White was decidedly with the … Read more
Twelve years ago I was asked to sing a selection of traditional Irish love songs in Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, for the launch of an anthology of Irish love poems. This collection had poems which were written over a period of 1,200 years, between 800 AD and the present era. Whitefriar Street of … Read more