What a country. We have had the most golden and renewing of spring weather of late, topped off by a visit to Tobin’s ancient pub in Ballyduff on Sunday after Medusa-fighting infernal brambles, where I was treated to A Local Man of Knowledge discoursing on the dangers of planting spuds with their eyes pointing...Read more »

Flann O’Brien, an all-timer among somersaulting absurdists who repaint gran’s reality, along with fellow Omnium U. nuncios like Laurence Tristram Shandy Sterne, Jonathan Lilliputian Swift, John Kennedy Confederacy of Dunces O’Toole, and Patrick Breakfast on Pluto McCabe ) would be 100 years old in October — if he...Read more »

Recently back from Boston, Connecticut, and New York City in support of my new book of this blog’s title, IRELAND UNHINGED. Book tours are notoriously quirky affairs, especially when interviewers have not even opened the book under discussion. But they possibly reach their peak oddity when one is writing about Ireland. Thus we had...Read more »

Ireland’s economy may be in a shambles, but its tongue remains silver and there is no better way to savour its cadences than to attend a few of the astonishing number of literary festivals dedicated to the country’s signature art. From Joyce’s Dublin to “Yeats Country” in Sligo and Frank O’Connor’s Cork, Ireland every...Read more »

In a sad, sad return to the days of yore, predictions are that 50,000 Irish people will have to flee this bedraggled country this year in search of work and a future elsewhere — with college graduates and professionals in the vanguard this time. Our daughter has already left for Vancouver. What will happen...Read more »

After pouring the nation’s newfound wealth down the sink into the never-never, as Michael Lewis has just so wonderfully described in Vanity Fair, Irish banks are getting more creative in their attempts to tidy up the mess with fresh approaches and regulations. These involve becoming houses of torture. Never mind chasing the guys who...Read more »

Went for a walkabout in Cork today, so good for the spirit, and here is what I saw in the face of  the political shambles and recessionary gloom. I saw at start of journey a taxi driver who refused to take more than 5 euros for a 12 euro ride, because he was new to the game after...Read more »

The country’s dead broke, but so is everything else, and therein lies the rust, the rub, and the charm. Me, I got problems. Got a broke tooth, got a broke dishwasher, clothes dryer, jet shower that never takes me over one Irish moon, broke phone, broke pipe, broke bank account – two hours of pushing...Read more »

The howls and guffaws of bitterness and consternation  have reached Gael force this week in the face of politics turned into a cynical circus of the absurd. To paraphrase Mellow Yellow who lives with tambourines and tra-la in Cork’s Mallow, a.k.a. Donavan, “First there  is a Taioseach, then there is no Taioseach, then there is.” After a black...Read more »

I journeyed this week to County Mayo to attend the funeral of a dear cousin, who had moved to the lovely town of Westport with his partner Tricia a few years ago to open a marvellous used bookshop, called Gibbons Interesting Books. John was an extraordinary figure, wiry, world-travelled, and knowing. He was in...Read more »

 Trading on clownish clichés about the Irish – the leprechaun, the shamrock and the drunk – gets a lot of people’s Irish up. To some, Paddywhackery is akin to sheer bigotry; to others, it’s Bord Failte. But Cathal O’Connell, the brash proprietor of Paddywagon Tours, frankly doesn’t give a damn – he’s made a...Read more »

Perhaps fitting for a place with its name, Blarney — that icon of Ireland to foreign eyes — is often not what it seems, and is as clouded with ill winds in this troubled tourist season as any place in this rapidly changing land. Forget for a moment Blarney’s gab stone and schlock. With...Read more »