Poet, Critic & Journalist
Shakespeare and Company is one of the most famous bookshops in the world but for fifty years it’s been living under false pretences. Situated on the quays in Paris, just around the corner from Boulevard St Michel and facing the side of Notre Dame, it’s been a place of pilgrimage by tourists who want to […]
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When John McCormack was at the pinnacle of his popular fame, Rachmaninov said to him: “John, you sing a good song well but you sing a bad song magnificently.” Rachmaninov was not alone in this lofty view of the songs that McCormack favoured, especially in the latter half of his career when he had abandoned […]
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In another life, Maeve Brennan could have been my mother, and in a way I see her as such. Born within two years of each other, they were Dubliners from neighbouring suburbs – my mother from Richmond Hill in Rathmines, Maeve from Cherryfield Avenue, a mile away in Ranelagh. Both of them were thin, petite, […]
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Halfway through Eurovision: The Contenders (RTE1), Marty Whelan stood beside an ancient cot at the Dublinia exhibition and announced “I’m going to have a lie-down in a second”.
“You don’t hear the hanging and flogging brigade on Liveline,” Joe Duffy told a newspaper interviewer a few months ago, “you don’t hear racist stuff.” That’s true. On this long-running interractive radio programme, which Duffy has now been hosting for more than ten years, there’s none of the rancid bigotry that you encounter on the […]
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IT’S traditionally the season when RTE personalities take even longer holidays than TDs, but there’ll be no rest for Montrose’s sports department in the coming months.
It was his unforced empathy with the marginalised, the deprived and the dispossessed that ensured a more general and deeper esteem Gerry Ryan was the brash face of RTE. When Radio 2 was launched in 1979, the marketing catchphrase devised for the new station was “Cominatcha”, and although Ryan didn’t start his long-running morning show […]
THREE hours before Brian Lenihan delivered his Budget, RTE radio’s Sean O’Rourke had deemed it “possibly the most leaked document of all time”, an opinion shared on Newstalk by pundit Mark Mortell, who thought it “leaked to a phenomenal degree”, and a little later by RTE1 anchorman Bryan Dobson, who felt that perhaps it had been “leaked to soften us up”.
I was in UCD in May 1968 but I was no college radical. For one thing, I was far too busy belatedly cramming for my finals in English language and literature to bother my barney about the state of the world or the nation or even the academic injustices that were so exercising my fellow […]
