From Trendy to Ted
Reflections on the TV career of comic actor Dermot Morgan
There is an irony in someone so deeply anti-clerical being most remembered for two roles as a priest, one of them naive and eager to please, the other somewhat bruised and resentful of his treatment by his superiors. The two also had some qualities in common: a basic decency and vulnerability and a degree of tolerance for the failings they find in themselves and in others. Such tolerance was not an outstanding feature of the Catholic church in Ireland during the decades in which Dermot Morgan grew up.
Following Henry Joy
The life and death of a martyr for revolutionary secular republicanism
Poetic Bears and Others
An anthology marked by warmth, bigness of heart and generosity of spirit
A Stay of Time
A tale of quest full of gritty realism, related in Sara Baume’s electric prose
Life in the Ghost Dog
A collection in which many poems are akin to well-worked short stories
Huguenot Voices
Diaries and memoirs of French Protestant refugees in Ireland
England and St George
The Brexit sensibility: between nostalgia and nationalism
Diversifying the Horizon
Complementing science with tribal strategies for human survival
Against the Grain
Poems marked by fierce imagination and enlivened by puckish wit
High Bred Yet Hybrid
A novelistic recreation of the life of the co-author of ‘The Irish RM’
The Opposite of Hatred
The afterlife of Christianity after the disappearance of religious belief
Where Art Happens
Novelist and critic: the book review as potential art form in itself
Together Again?
A Northern novelist probes the reality behind the Border poll scenario
'The Last Irish Question’ is a must-read for all those citizens, north, south, east and west, who have a real interest in how the country will be shaped politically in the decades ahead. By turns quizzical and questioning but thoroughly clear-eyed, Glenn Patterson’s book brings a refreshingly sceptical tone to the bravado and determinism of much internal Irish discourse on issues surrounding the Irish border, post-Brexit planning and ‘reunification’ – the quotation marks signify historical doubts on the idea of ‘re’.
Blogs et cetera
Defending History
Maurice Earls writes: A story entitled “Three Glimpses of Life”, written by Patrick Kavanagh in preparation for his landmark novel Tarry Flynn, is a good place to start for anyone wanting to understand the culture that took root over much of Ireland in the century following the Famine. The story, set in the 1930s, was published in The Bell in 1944. The novel Tarry Flynn was published in 1948 and promptly banned on grounds of indecency.
Some millennials and others in the lately arrived Z cohort might wonder why anyone would feel a need “to understand the culture that took...
Some millennials and others in the lately arrived Z cohort might wonder why anyone would feel a need to understand the Irish past ‑ a place of grim sexual repression and Stygian darkness surely? Isn’t all that behind us now? But this would be to embrace a local version of the-end-of-history theory, which is not likely to prove any less delusional here than it has done internationally. Irish social liberalism was not downloaded from the internet in the late 1990s: it has its roots in the past just as much as Irish illiberalism has.