Poet, Critic & Journalist
Long before I ever set foot in Paris, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his life there in the 1920s had begun my love affair with the French capital. Published in 1964, three years after the author’s suicide, its loving evocation of a vanished time and a vibrant place and its gossip about the writers and artists […]
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“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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Baz Ashmawy is RTE2’s intended answer to Louis Theroux, except that the BBC has never required its man to co-host a cringe-inducing reality contest. But then again, on those occasions when he’s not being smirkingly faux-naif, Theroux can come up with programmes of insight and substance, whereas Ashmawy was all too suited to the ghastly […]
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A man dies suddenly at the age of fifty-three. He is unknown to the wider community, but he has a wife and children, parents, siblings, friends, neighbours and work colleagues. A death notice appears in the newspapers and his removal and funeral service are attended by those who knew and loved him. We all attend such funerals, and others will be attending ours one day.
From what I’ve read about Alan Sillitoe, who died recently, he seemed to be an admirable man as well as a fine writer – and far removed in basic values from some of today’s most celebrated authors, for whom rock-star fame and fortune appear to be as important as their supposed vocation. Certainly I can’t […]
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In a recent newspaper column, author Patrick McCabe said he had spent much of the previous week reading George Orwell. “What baffles me,” he wrote, “is how prescient Orwell was”, and he instances “a great bit where he says everyone now is living the same kinds of lives.” This caused the Clones-born author to reflect […]
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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 […]
Midway through the Arts Lives documentary, Gilbert O’Sullivan: Out on His Own (RTE1), the singer-songwriter explained to his wife his stance regarding the promotion of his music and his image. “I’m not talking about myself,” he told her. “I’m talking about Gilbert O’Sullivan.” The “myself” in question was Raymond Edward O’Sullivan, who was born in […]
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Where would we be without RTE to cater for our every need and to serve our deepest longings? Recognising, for instance, that one weekend chat show wouldn’t be sufficient to slake our thirst for interviews with C-list celebs, our national broadcaster decided last January to follow up Friday night’s Late Late Show with a Saturday […]
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What is it about Ian McEwan that has elevated him to the status of Greatest Contemporary English Novelist? “He is this country’s unrivalled literary giant,” according to the books critic of the Independent in London. “The supreme novelist of his generation,” the Sunday Times has called him, while the Guardian deems him “our de facto […]
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Two weeks ago, on RTE1’s The Meaning of Life, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern paid homage to a deity who forgave and forgot earthly transgressions and who had no problem with such footling matters as extra-marital relationships. That wasn’t the God familiar to me from the same kind of upbringing and education that Bertie experienced, but […]
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Prior to his arrest by the French authorities in 1942 and his subsequent murder by the Nazis, Michael Epstein left a piece of luggage with his two small daughters. “Never part from this suitcase,” he told them, “it contains your mother’s manuscript.” Their mother had already been deported to Auschwitz, where she died within a […]
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Last Monday week Charlie Bird told an uncaring nation that he was quitting his job as RTE’s Washington correspondent. Seven days later George Lee caused somewhat more of a stir when he announced that he was resigning from his nine-month-old post as a Fine Gael TD. Such is Bird’s inflated notion of himself that he […]
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At the outset of Charlie Bird’s American Year (RTE1), Barack Obama was being inaugurated as US president, and our intrepid Washington correspondent was wondering what lay ahead for the man. “This time next year,” he mused, “where will the journey have taken him? Who knows? And who knows where the journey will have taken me?” […]
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No one in literature has written with such dark intensity and sardonic humour about the pleasures and perils of pub life as Patrick Hamilton – and he wasn’t even Irish. Instead, his luckless characters inhabit the bars around Earls Court and the Edgeware Road. Occasionally they’re to be found nursing a pint or a whiskey […]
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I first met Frank McCourt in November 1996. It was just before the publication of Angela’s Ashes on this side of the Atlantic, and his name was unknown to me, as it was then to most Irish people – including the late and much lamented Limerick Labour party TD Jim Kemmy. It was Jim who […]
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Window and floor displays in most bookshops are almost invariably a sea of pink, peach and yellow covers – thereby signifying the latest chick lit titles and thus denoting women writers. On the other end of the literary spectrum, women have been snaffling up most of the prestigious awards – Hilary Mantel winning the Man […]
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It was through my colleague and great friend Joe Kennedy that I first met Liam Clancy. That was 23 years ago come New Year’s Eve, although of course I’d known of the man throughout all of my adolescent and adult life.
It was through my colleague and great friend Joe Kennedy that I first met Liam Clancy. That was 20 years ago come New Year’s Eve, although of course I’d known of the man throughout all of my adolescent and adult life. Indeed, for an Irish teenager in the early to mid-1960s it was impossible not […]
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For a brief period back in the 1990s, though it now seems like the 1890s, Clare McKeon was RTE’s chosen presenter of girl-talk shows. I can’t recall whether this was before or after our national broadcaster’s equally fickle infatuations with Bibi Baskin and Carrie Crowley, but for a while Clare was its darling, fronting a […]
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