Latest Blogs
The Invisible Heart
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: In an interview with Jody Randolph-Allen some thirty years ago, Eavan Boland suggested that the “project in the nature poem is a revised way of seeing, rather than the thing that’s seen”. The nature writer, by extension, might be thought of as a figure who contributes clarity and freshness, new complexities, to…
Doctor and Humanist
Kieran Murphy writes: How will you ever know someone else? The cask that houses their brain may be familiar to you, but their consciousness and preoccupations will always only be glimpsed. Their nuances, doubts, and ambitions will never be transparent. In 1986, when I was an intern at Jervis Street hospital in Dublin, Eoin O’Brien…
Down Among the Dead Files
Sean Byrne writes: On a wet and windy October morning in 1975 I presented myself, as instructed in a letter from the Civil Service Commission, at the Department of Posts and Telegraphs to begin work as an Administrative Officer. The main operations of the Department were then in the GPO and the offices were entered…
Gerald Dawe: 1952-2024
Katrina Goldstone writes: A month and a half before he died, I wrote to my friend the poet Gerry Dawe proposing we do a book together. A few times over our nearly thirty-year friendship, we’d talked about joint projects where our interests intersected. But it never happened, probably because Gerry was so prolific and disciplined…
The Strasbourg Case
Michael Lillis writes: In the summer of 1972 I was transferred from the Irish embassy in Franco’s Madrid, where I had served as a Third Secretary (the lowest form of diplomatic life) for four years, to the Department’s headquarters in Dublin and assigned to its new Anglo-Irish Division, which was dealing with the crisis in…
Father’s Day
Dermot Hodson writes: Of the dark past A child is born; With joy and grief My heart is torn. Written on the occasions of his grandson’s birth in February 1932 and his father’s death two months earlier, the opening lines of James Joyce’s poem ‘Ecce Puer’ are among the author’s most personal. The strained…
A Visit to the Deathhouse
Enda O’Doherty writes: Zadie Smith, in a NYRB review back in 2008 of a biographical essay on Franz Kafka by Louis Begley, made the to my mind somewhat unlikely connection between the (apparently) tortured Prague fabulist and the merely grumpy Hull librarian Philip Larkin. But while the comparison may not work across all departments,…
Exporting the Poor
Sean Byrne writes: As one of the Commissioners on Mother and Baby Homes, Professor Mary Daly, is a very distinguished historian, it is surprising that the consigning of so many single mothers to Mother and Baby Homes is not linked to Ireland’s economic underdevelopment from Independence to the 1960s. The report points out that Mother…
Find the Author
Hiram Morgan writes: Manuscripts are the principal key to studying the history of England’s conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These include the Irish State Papers held in the UK National Archives at Kew in London as well as several other collections in public and private archives. One of the…
Painting Light
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: ‘Yours is the art that conveys / what the world is made of.’ So Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin writes in ‘Instructions to an Architect’, imploring her interlocutor to ‘build me a shelter’, in anticipation of a future that seems already ‘fractured from the inside’. The poet too can redeem and repair a broken…
John Barth: 1930-2024
Kevin Power writes: It was John Barth’s achievement to become a significant figure without ever becoming a major, or even really a popular novelist. It was as if he decided, early in his career, that somebody had to be American Literature’s representative postmodernist, and that that somebody might as well be him. He filled the…
Entering the Whirlpool
David Barnes writes: Succession’s Frank Vernon likes ‘to recite Prufrock internally while we check we’re GAAP-compliant’ (Season Two, Episode Six). He goes on to suggest others ‘use whatever method you prefer to numb the pain’. GAAP are Generally Accepted Accounting Principles – principles that Waystar Royco, the corporate behemoth whose story is chronicled in HBO’s…