Surviving Another Sunset

I got shot in the arm once when I was living in Lille (Northern France), walking from the metro to my place of work. Fortunately, it was with an air-rifle so I wasn’t badly hurt although my arm hurt like a bastard for the rest of the day. It took me a moment or two… Read more »

Finn (cough) MacCool versus Ming The Merciless

Because I tend to focus predominantly on culturally accurate Irish ‘mythology’, I come across a lot of examples where that mythology ends up being misrepresented or manipulated into something it’s not. This is what we find with the following teaser trailer for a film called “Finn MacCool” (sadly, despite the character’s Gaelic origins, the Gaelic… Read more »

The Strange Truth behind the Irish Mythological Cycles

Irish Mythological Cycles

In the mid-eighteenth century, an English detective working in Dublin was assigned to investigate the disappearance of a missing Irishman. On travelling to the up-market suburb where this individual had lived in a tiny hovel amongst the splendid Georgian architecture, the detective questioned the various individuals that lived nearby. What the detective found surprised him.… Read more »

The Poor Mouth

If you get a chance over the Christmas period, you might want to wallow in your “Irishnessness” with the animated satire of Flann O’Brien’s 1941 novel ‘An Béal Bocht’ (The Poor Mouth) which premiered last year at the Galway Film Fleadh. Flann O’Brien’s original tale was actually a fond piss-take of Irish autobiographies like Peig… Read more »

PERFORATING TIME

 One of the things I love about Ireland is how the thin film of that present we inhabit is so often perforated by the reality of previous millennia. Many people believe that time travels in a linear fashion from past to present to future but of course that conceptual model doesn’t work in reality. The… Read more »

Poetry, Storms and Jet-Lag

I was lucky enough to catch up with Doireann Ní Ghríofa in the city this weekend where we met up for a brief interview at Capital Irish Radio. Doireann was in Wellington City as part of the Lit Crawl (a kind of literature festival taking place in Wellington this weekend that’s based on a pub… Read more »