The Best of Frank O’Connor edited by Julian Barnes

In an essay published five years ago, Julian Barnes observed that since Frank O’Connor’s death in 1966 “a respectful forgetting has settled over him,” and it’s true that in the last four decades his books have not been much read or his name often evoked  – this despite the fact that in his lifetime he […]

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CHARLIE BIRD’S AMERICAN YEAR

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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Patrick Hamilton

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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Frank McCourt

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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Orange Prize Sexism

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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RTE rates quantity over quality with spring schedule

IN a press release announcing its spring schedule, and with January not yet gone, RTE declares itself delighted by what it has already been offering us this year, starting with ‘The School’, a series which apparently has been “critically acclaimed”.

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I’m left pondering the meaning of Rte

Gay Byrne returned to our screens on Monday night with a second series of The Meaning of Life (RTE1), but having spent the three weeks since New Year’s Day waiting for our national broadcaster to transmit one programme of real substance, I feel more like pondering the meaning of RTE.

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TV3 aiming to hit home run with latest line-up

ACCORDING to the press release announcing its spring schedule, TV3 has had a “fantastic autumn”.

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COLLECTED STORIES by William Trevor.

The Stories of William Trevor, which comprised his first five collections, was published by Penguin in 1983. Nine years later, Viking published the Collected Stories in a massive, physically unwieldy volume that ran to 1,260 pages and that contained the 87 stories from his his first seven collections. Now we have a new Collected Stories, […]

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TV Review

Everything’s a reality show on RTE these days and now you can’t even go to school without being forced to run a gauntlet of camera crews. School? We’ve all been there. It’s got teachers, it’s got pupils, it’s got classes. It can be dreary, it can be enlightening. Some pupils do well at certain subjects, […]

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COLLECTED STORIES by William Trevor

The Stories of William Trevor, which comprised his first five collections, was published by Penguin in 1983. Nine years later, Viking published the Collected Stories in a massive, physically unwieldy volume that ran to 1,260 pages and that contained the 87 stories from his his first seven collections. Now we have a new Collected Stories, […]

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RTE promises comedy, talent and Charlie Bird

Announcing its January schedule, RTE promises us “a wealth of home-produced programming” that will “get 2010 off to an entertaining and energising start”.

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Tv of the Decade

It was the decade in which there were more programmes than ever to watch, though just as few worth watching. Indeed, more invariably means less, and so when the very finite number of good programmes capable of being made are spread over 187 channels, they hardly register amid the gunge that surrounds them. There’s only […]

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TV HIGHLIGHTS OF 2009

It was the year of Susan Boyle and The X Factor, for those who care about such things. It was the year in which Michael Jackson’s death caused even the most sober of broadcasting organisations to lose all sense of balance and perspective. And it was the year when economic realities should have put paid […]

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TV Review of the Year 2009

It was the year in which RTE’s marketing gurus vanquished and routed serious programme makers. Certainly, I can’t think of a twelve-month period in which RTE made fewer programmes of substance or quality, but, hey, who needs programmes at all when you can marvel at Montrose’s mission to turn every  nonentity on its payroll into […]

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Killers; Lolita; Delia’s Christmas; The Apprentice

Killers, which RTE1 screened on Sunday night, was essentially an hour-long version of those murder-scene reconstructions you get on the same channel’s Crimecall, except that on Crimecall they’re invariably followed by pleas for assistance from the public in catching the criminal while here the perpetrator had already been identified, arrested, charged, convicted and locked up. […]

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Shane McGowan; Alan Bennett…

RTE seems to have reached the sorry stage where the mere notion of celebrity is enough to get a programme made. How else to explain Tuesday night’s RTE1 documentary, Victoria and Shane Grow Their Own? The Shane in question was Shane McGowan and the Victoria was Victoria Mary Clarke, and whereas the former is deservedly […]

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Budget news coverage: It will go down in history but presenters couldn’t live up to the sense of occasion

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”.

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The Savage Eye; Battle of the Sexes

Am I imagining it or have Podge and Rodge curbed their enthusiasm for potty talk in the last week or two, and if so could this be due to the dismay expressed by myself and a few others at the duo’s recent inability to distinguish the ribald from the rancid?  Given RTE’s unwillingness to heed […]

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One extraordinary storyteller with a real passion for life

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.

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