Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
The Great Unloved
Many claim that Ahern was constrained by the desire of the PDs and liberal ministers in his Cabinet to cut back the state. This misses the point that the social partners, including the unions, were central to the call for…
Sifting And Winnowing
Many self-proclaimed radicals choose to exercise their freedom in order to tell students what to think, rather than take the slower, truly academic (and ultimately more subversive) path of teaching them how to think. As such they bear an uncanny…
Belonging And Becoming
It would seem that it was in Beckett that he found the literary model for a kind of narrative based on a deconstruction of received knowledge, on doubt as an instrument of style that could be inserted into an historical…
Picking At It
Critics of his revisions, Yeats wrote, needed to grasp “what issue is at stake: / It is myself that I remake”, but self-reinvention is one thing and tinkering for tinkering’s sake another, the low-level molestation of poems to no discernible…
Documents of a Spiritual Resistance
Of the love poems, the two outstanding examples are by an archbishop of Tuam, Maol Mhuire Ó hUigín. One is addressed to a young man called Eoghan, but the point is to warn this youth not to fall in love…
Carving It Up
On July 9th, 2004, the International Court of Justice found the separation wall, with the judge appointed by the United States the sole dissenting voice, to be in violation of international law. The government of Ariel Sharon ignored the judgment…
Get Smart
Strategic thinking is always a bonus in politics, never more so than during a crisis. It is comparatively rare in Irish political life, notably in linking national and international developments. Arguably, and paradoxically, Ireland has been better at long term…
Flash Fiction
There are things you can do when your husband sleeps with your sister. You can sit in your studio and imagine them together, the toad and the mouse. Him moving over her. Her on top of him. You can hear…
The Kids Are Alright
The story of Minnie with her heart “as big as a whale” is the old story of the beautiful and somewhat innocent young woman who falls for a useless cad, one who gives her things that she ain’t needin’ and…
Mind And Mystery
In a BBC Four documentary (Pol Pot’s Executioner: Welcome to Hell – May 2011), a torturer said that the only way he could have tortured his victims was to regard them as animals, as he was required to do. The…
Back To Basics
It is one of the weaknesses of Judt’s position – and a symptomatic one – that he never addresses the question of affordability. “Even in social democratic Norway”, he complains, failure to demonstrate that one is seeking work can be…
Back To The Reader
In the opening interview, Enright expresses her impatience with endless questions about “Irishness”. And that leads her into a telling digression: