Just up from the 350 million year old realm of blackness in the bowels of the earth beneath the Galtee Mountains, which is to say Michelstown Cave. This is the Ur world of three kilometers of caverns and jagged passageways boasting arrays of awe striking stalactites and stalagmites dripping with time, ghoulish formations growing...Read more »

What rain? In Fermoy today doowap music blasting from a loud speaker and maybe fifty twelve year-olds (one boy) exuberantly arms-kimbo dancing in synch on the footpaths. For old time’s sake I dabbled in the jaywalking, dug the smiles on the passing pedestrians faces. Ah so, it was drizzling and the nation is bankrupt,...Read more »

What’s going on in Ireland, the within and without it wants to know. Answer to make your head scratch: A 5% reduction in the tax on hair-dressing to jump start the economy. Really. But also newpapers like the Irish Times and the rest, perhaps the most over-priced in the world and woefully complicit all...Read more »

Forget — or rather don’t — all past comments on this site about the Irish government, banks, future, bookmakers, and even smallest systems going dysfunctional. Entropy has gone global. Yet it appears the gremlims of the universe may be unfarily targeting Ireland and even more unfairly me in particular. This could be the revenge...Read more »

Raymond Lloyd says that the killjoys are taking over in this letter to Cork Evening Echo dated June 20 concerning a garda raid on the Cork Arms, where the owner, Patsy O’Leary, was enjoying an after-hours drink with a few friends in celebration of her birthday during the Cork Jazz festival. This kind of...Read more »

A strange morning in Ballyduff, the sun fleeting, the weather fickle and white swans on the Blackwater. They say the salmon are moving now but they do not swim into the room where I write and from which I stare out at the eternally moving water. I hear singing and move out onto the...Read more »

On the trail I have been. Across this Ireland to which I seem to be destined to offer up platters of platitudes and maybe something more. You could spend a lifetime trying to figure it out, while not getting very far. Like what was I doing in a grandiose kind-of-dukish castle in Lismore reading...Read more »

Nearly every person I have spoken with in last few days — including self-styled republicans (i.e., “Brits Out” nationalists, though hardly of Ulster passions) — was strangely moved by the Queen’s visit as a signal and somehow healing point in Irish history. Just after her Cork visit ended, it was amazing to see Patrick...Read more »

So I come back to Cork after some days away and leave a black bag of my clothes in the hallway, including my best clothes intended to be worn for the smashing launch of Ireland Unhinged at the lovely Boqueria a couple of nights ago. BUT: Bag disappears, flat out vanishes. A couple of...Read more »

In South Tipperary there lies a region of highland fields ringed by dark mountains historically known as the Barony of Iffa and Offa. I have come here because this name sums up the Iffa and Offa that Ireland is now enduring, what with its recent arc of soaring possibility wilting back through clouds of...Read more »

The bad economic news keep raining down as hard as the weather of the last week – new taxes on pensions, on water, and on property to feed the increasingly bottomless repayments to the IMF and European Central Bank. Meanwhile, consumer energy prices are slated to rise by 20 percent. Writing in today’s Irish...Read more »

The light all these new April days out here in Ballyduff is just a glory, a glory so needed and deserved in this country now. The goodness of some people shining. Yesterday I climbed into nearby hills and up a boreen of silence to meet with two of the finer characters around these parts,...Read more »