Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
A Progressive Abroad
Why did the Kilkenny-born writer Francis Hackett emigrate so soon after finishing his secondary education at Clongowes in 1900? Why did he not go on to UCD? Why, despite working briefly for the leading Irish-American figure, lawyer and patron of the arts John Quinn, did he not settle into the Irish-American cultural milieu like his…
Failing Better
Brian Friel: Beginnings, by Kelly Matthews, Four Courts Press, 216 pp, €26.95, ISBN: 978-1801511407 The decade after the death of an acclaimed dramatist generally sees a rise or fall in their fortunes, and the deciding of a reputation. Brian Friel would seem to be an exception to this rule. He died in 2015, not quite…
Toy Story
In the course of 2023, RTÉ was plunged into an existential crisis that appeared to be largely of its own making. It seemed that one scandal after another was being revealed in the press or in sessions of Oireachtas committees. The feeble and evasive attempts by some of the station’s senior management to offer explanations…
Imperishable Song
One of the many remarkable aspects of the recent selection of Seamus Heaney’s letters (The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid, published by Faber & Faber) is the recurring echo of WB Yeats’s voice. Heaney frequently used Yeats’s vocabulary and diction when writing to fellow poets or others likely to appreciate the echo….
Ukraine Diary
January 2nd, 2024 The rain wouldn’t let up last night, this morning really. At 3.10 am I picked up my phone to find a Substack note linked to a piece on Gaza that had a familiar construction: commonly recognised facts, followed by unnecessary adjectives, significant omissions, self-indulgent insertion of personal disgust, all tied together with…
Myths About Migration
This year an unprecedented number of elections are taking place around the world. At or near the top of the agenda in many of them is immigration. Hardly any other issue has a more polarising impact. Fear, suspicion and ignorance fill the spaces around it. Xenophobic falsehoods are being widely disseminated. The arrival in Europe…
Witness for the Prosecution
The Romance of American Communism, by Vivian Gornick, Verso, 265 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-1788735506 In a TLS podcast in March 2021 the reviewers Thea Lenarduzzi, Lucy Dallas and novelist Claire Lowdon tried to puzzle out why eighty-something-year-old Vivian Gornick was ‘having a moment’. None could fully account for whey the critic, essayist and memoirist was…
A Century of Art
Irish Art 1920 – 2020: Perspectives on Change, Catherine Marshall & Yvonne Scott (eds), Royal Irish Academy, 448 pp, €38, ISBN: 978-1911479826 Irish Art 1920-2020: Perspectives on Change is an excellent collection of twelve intersecting perspectives that examine Irish art and design as it has evolved over the long twentieth century into the present. The…
Attack, attack, attack
During his tenure as president, Donald Trump used his office to grant executive clemency to more than 200 individuals charged or convicted of federal criminal offences. That may seem like a lot, but it is fewer than many of his predecessors: Bill Clinton, for example, pardoned more than twice that number. However, Trump’s use of…
Lost Poets’ Society
I teach a class in Irish poetry a couple of times a year and I always begin with Sappho, fragment 31, chanted in a YouTube video by a chorus of voices in the original Aeolic Greek. It causes confusion: at least two students in every group begin their weekly journal with ‘My favourite Irish poet…
Literary / Capital: Dublin
At St Stephen’s Green in 2024, sandwich-snatching seagulls, mangled-footed pigeons, office workers and the growing numbers of Dublin’s tented population comingle on a weekday lunchtime. The twenty-seven-acre park was originally built in 1680 on the outskirts of a city that was, according to a 1635 city assembly, ‘groweing very populous’. The opening of Grafton Street…
The Causes of Quarrels
There are fascinating parallels between Anna Parnell’s The Tale of a Great Sham and Andrew J Kettle’s The Material for Victory – two recently republished memoirs of key protagonists in Ireland’s Land War of 1879-1882. Both accounts contain unvarnished critiques of shortcomings of the Land League movement, revolving mainly around failures of leadership and execution…