Eastern European Poetry in a Time of Trauma

I have been working in education for the last twenty-three years, and been publishing books as a writer over the last sixteen. I find disturbing the recent precipitous decline in reading and, consequent ignorance pervading contemporary culture. In response, in an effort to demonstrate its importance to my critical development, I would like to trace … Read more

My Mother (at the Time)

 This is a special episode of our Cassandra Voices podcast, where host Luke Sheehan travelled to Amsterdam to interview the Irish critic, art historian and Joycean named Patrick Healy. In a suburb of Tokyo, sometime in the future, a Japanese scholar of Irish literature is studying an obscure text. He has heard of it … Read more

Ten Faery Tales for Our Time

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

The End of RTÉ’s “Drive Time” Omertá

And so, the omertà as to the RTÉ personnel getting ‘freebie’ cars has finally broken. It’s no coincidence that this was the only outlet probing this matter five years ago. We knew the topic was highly unlikely to be picked up by media reliant on revenue streams from advertising cars. We also knew that covering … Read more

Drive Time: The Irish Media’s Message

Tune into any Irish radio station, and it is hard to escape the constant flogging of motor cars: RTE’s flagship ‘Morning Ireland’ is associated with Opel; sports bulletins on the same programme are brought to you by Kia; traffic introduced by Hyundai, only afterwards to be announced as ‘AA Roadwatch’. Ads for other brands such … Read more