HAVEN. By Emma Donoghue. Picador

HAVEN. By Emma Donoghue. Picador In June 2012, encouraged and accompanied by our daughter, we embarked on the scariest boat trip I’ve ever undertaken. The morning was stormy when we set off from Portmagee in west Kerry on our way to Skellig Michael seven miles out in the ocean and, given the sea’s turbulence, most […]

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THE GARDEN. By Paul Perry. New Island.

THE GARDEN. By Paul Perry. New Island. I know very little about orchids and even less about ghost orchids. But they’re to be found in Cuba and in the Florida everglades, and the pursuit of these elusive flowers, highly prized because of their rarity, forms the subject of Paul Perry’s atmospheric and absorbing novel, which […]

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APRIL IN SPAIN. By John Banville.

APRIL IN SPAIN. By John Banville. Faber & Faber For much of this hugely enjoyable and exciting thriller, John Banville is in playful, almost skittish, mood. It’s the 1950s and Dublin pathologist Quirke (previously encountered in the books by the author’s former alter ego Benjamin Black), has embarked on a happy second marriage. He and […]

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Dylan Lyrics

Songs are not poems and song lyrics are not lines of verse to be read on a page. That should be self-evident, and thus when the Nobel committee announced that its 2016 prize for literature was to be awarded to Bob Dylan, lovers of both poetry and music were bemused. Yes, he probably deserved a […]

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THE LYRICS: 1956 to the Present. By Paul McCartney.

THE LYRICS: 1956 to the Present. By Paul McCartney. Edited and Introduced by Paul Muldoon. Allen Lane, £75 sterling From my adolescence onwards, Paul McCartney has been a constant musical companion in my day-to-day life – as he has been in the lives of so many others. And in the Lennon v McCartney debate that […]

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There was only One Con Houlihan

Irish Independent, February 23, 2013 In one of his hundreds of sports columns from the 1970s, Con Houlihan paid tribute to the great Welsh scrumhalf, Gareth Edwards, who at that time was at the pinnacle both of his game and of his fame. A fitting subject, then, for a writer who had a lifelong and particular passion for […]

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James Plunkett

Sunday Miscellany, April 2013 Married to my mother’s sister, he was Jimmie Kelly to all who knew him and Uncle Jimmie to us, but to the world outside he was James Plunkett – Plunkett being his middle name – the noted broadcaster and writer who achieved global fame as the author of Strumpet City. However, it’s Uncle […]

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How do RTE’s Top Earners Manage to Survive?

Irish Independent, March 28, 2013 Spare a thought for Marian Finucane. She’s on air for an arduous two hours on Saturday mornings and then for an equally gruelling two hours on Sunday mornings, and RTE expects her to survive on a trifling €295,000 a year. Break that down and the figures are even more stark. Allowing for […]

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Brian O’ Driscoll

Sunday Miscellany, May 2012 “Oh, my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!” That was Francis Thompson’s recurring refrain in his 1870s poem, At Lord’s, as he recalled the cricketing heroes of his youth. If I were to rewrite this affecting poem today, the subject would be rugby, a sport I love more than cricket, and the refrain […]

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Lonely Voices: The Irish Short Story from James Joyce to Claire Keegan

Lecture given to Kate O’Brien Winter School, February 2010 What I want to do in this talk is to celebrate the Irish short story and, in the process, to try to define what makes it so distinctive – and, indeed, to try and tease out what has drawn so many Irish writers to it. But […]

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Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin

The decade following Philip Larkin’s death in 1985 was calamitous for his reputation. On his demise, he was the most widely loved poet of his time and his passing was mourned by people for whom his beautifully crafted and deeply felt lyrics were proof that contemporary verse didn’t have to be obscurantist and alienating. But […]

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On Canaan’s Side. By Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)

Irish Independent, July 23, 2011 Reviewing The Secret Scripture in 2008, I described Sebastian Barry as “an unrivalled chronicler of lost lives”, and his new novel also concerns people who, disregarded by society, have never been registered in the elitist ledgers of official history. As with its predecessor, the central character is a woman whose life coincides […]

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Pat Kenny

Irish Independent, 2010 When you switch on BBC2’s Newsnight and find that it’s being anchored, not by Jeremy Paxman, but by Kirsty Walk, Gavin Essler or Emily Maitlis, there’s a palpable sense of disappointment – alert and professional as these presenters are, they’re not Paxman and don’t create the same frisson of anticipation in the majority of viewers. […]

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The Late Late Show

Irish Independent, 2012 When President de Valera addressed the nation through the new medium of Irish television on New Year’s Eve, 1961, he compared broadcasting to atomic energy, both of which “can be used for incalculable good but can also do irreparable harm.” Indeed, he confessed that when he thought of the “immense power” of television and radio […]

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The Complete Poems. By Philip Larkin. Edited by Archie Burnett (Faber & Faber)

Irish Independent, February 11, 2012 When Philip Larkin died in 1985, he was England’s most loved modern poet. Then came Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the Selected Letters and Andrew Motion’s biography and suddenly Larkin was being denounced as a racist, porn-addicted misogynist whose tainted verse wasn’t fit to be taught in schools or colleges – as if art […]

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The Devil I know By Claire Kilroy. Faber & Faber

In Claire Kilroy’s new novel, a corrupt government minister doesn’t send hirelings to collect brown envelopes for the rezoning favours he’s about to render – he brazenly turns up himself to meet the property developer at a local pub and walks away with a jiffy bag that’s bulging with banknotes. In nearly every other detail, though, Kilroy’s picaresque […]

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The Casual Vacancy. By JK Rowling (Little, Brown)

September 29, 2012 So was it worth all the hype? Did it merit an embargo so strictly enforced that anyone outside the author’s immediate family didn’t see the book until 8am this Thursday? And after seven Harry Potter adventures, did The Casual Vacancy reveal that JK Rowling had finally grown up? Well, to answer the last question first, […]

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John F Kennedy

Irish Independent, 2011 Such is the power of myth that John F Kennedy’s visit to Ireland in the summer of 1963 affected people who weren’t even born at the time. Ryan Tubridy’s fascination with the man is proof of that. It meant little to me, though. A teenager who had just done his Leaving Cert, I had […]

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Mortality. By Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic Books)

Irish Independent, September 8, 2012 Christopher Hitchens revelled in doing battle with political and religious foes, but all his debating and writing skills proved no match for the most intimate and lethal enemy of all, and so the oesophagal cancer that had breached his bodily defences in 2010 killed him last December. Not that he had any time […]

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New Ways to Kill your Mother: Writers and Their Families. By Colm Toibin.

Irish Independent, February 25, 2012 The teasing main title suggests a playful putdown of misery memoirs and earnest tomes about family dysfunction, but the book’s serious thrust is indicated by the subtitle and any matricide that’s contemplated here is purely figurative. Indeed, troublesome fathers loom larger than bothersome mothers in Toibin’s loosely-linked essays on writers and their families, […]

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