Author Archive

Ireland keeps turning, as the world does. Was just taped for the radio of Canada, the Gaelic Hour out of Ottawa (can you get in?) to rant or observe. Sunny economic predictions not in the quiver, but what a run it has been through these holidays. With extraordinarily mild weather there has been an...Read more »

Anyone who thinks Ireland to be a small island has never been to Derry. From Cork, you must train first to Dublin (3 hours), light rail and wait and wait to Connelly Station (1 hour min.), train to Belfas (almost 3 hrs), wait, train to Derry (almost 3 hrs)  and after 12 hours you...Read more »

In a  new take on jaw-dropping bad taste,  an unhinged Irish property developer, Mr. Joe McNamara, has been building a massive concrete replication of Stonehenge on remote Achill Island in County Mayo, home to countless literary and artistic evocations of the unspoilt beautyof the country’s west coast. The affair, which consists of a 350 foot in diameter circle...Read more »

Gob-smacking the rule again this week. Turns out the geniuses monitoring the country’s dire finances and various begging bowls to powers afar have been having some problems with their maths. Somebody did a double check and found out wizards from two different gov bureaus had simultaneously entered a 3.6 billion euro loss to the...Read more »

The crash of the Celtic Tiger has resulted in many distressing stories, with some of the misery to a not insignificant minority being  deserved. But when the heartbreak gets very local and personal and vivid it becomes more wrenching. Out in Ballyduff  just now — that parallel Waterford  universe of an Ireland of surpassing beauty with older values...Read more »

It is that time of the evening in Ireland. There is a vixen in my life and she skulks into my garden to eat apples now every day. Do foxes eat apples? I wondered too. But through sheer epistimology I can now swear that they do, and that they are mine. The golden apples...Read more »