Poet, Critic & Journalist
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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Irish Independent, March 12, 2011 In Colm Toibin’s short story, The News from Dublin, a Wexford teacher in the 1950s is seated in the Dail’s public gallery awaiting an audience with the health minister, from whom he seeks a favour. While waiting, he observes the TDs in the chamber below him: “The Fine Gael people […]
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Book clubs are everywhere and if they encourage people to read good books and to analyse and articulate their thoughts about what they’re reading, that’s undoubtedly a good thing – just as Socrates assured us that the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined book is probably a waste of time, too. The only […]
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Ever since I was a teenager and saw Les Quatre Cents Coups in the Fine Arts Cinema Club that used to exist in the basement of Busaras, Francois Truffaut has been one of my heroes. It was in that movie – made 50 years ago this summer, though showing no signs of ageing – that […]
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It’s almost ten years since Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, created such a stir – and a well-deserved one at that – among critics and readers. Since then, she’s written other novels (On Beauty, her updating of EM Forster’s Howards End, was especially intriguing) but more and more you’ll find her writing lengthy pieces […]
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I have had many editors in a long career in journalism, but it was the Irish Press’s literary editor, David Marcus, who left the most lasting impression on me. Even before joining the paper at the age of 22, I had submitted poems to its New Irish Writing page and David had published some of […]
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Down through the years, he has retired more often than Frank Sinatra — in rumour, if not in real life. Indeed, in the past decade it became axiomatic that as each successive RTE season loomed, every newspaper in the land would inevitably speculate on his imminent going and publish a suitably sombre and seriously measured […]
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RTE1’s new half-hour series, The Big Story, began by promising us that we were about to relive “some of the major scoops that have occurred in the career of Charlie Bird.” This was a pleasure most of us had been eagerly awaiting for years. After all, we had accompanied Charlie on his epic voyage down […]
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“It has interested and excited me more than any novel I have read for a number of years.” That was TS Eliot’s considered opinion of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and for many years it was used by Penguin as a blurb to their edition of the book. Nowadays, though, book-jacket endorsements by famous […]
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The art of adverse criticism is all but dead, or at least so rare as to be the occasion of news stories. A century ago, George Bernard Shaw regularly railed at the awfulness of English music and the turgidity of Brahms. In the 1950s , Kenneth Tynan felt free to skewer the pretensions of Beckett […]
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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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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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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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The first genuine books I ever read – not The Secret Seven, not Biggles Sweeps the Desert, not even The Wind in the Willows, but real books with adult thoughts and feelings – came courtesy of Rathmines public library, where I spent too many evenings of my teenage years. Yet even though a library is […]
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