Do you remember ‘The Snapper’? Roddy Doyle’s classic second book of the Barrytown Trilogy, published in 1990, revolves around the Rabbitte family and the teenage pregnancy of Sharon Rabbitte. Written in the late 1980s, it is a familiar tale about a...
The Pharaoh awoke petrified by a dream. None of his holy men could interpret it. The Pharaoh dreamed that he was standing by the Nile and that seven cows “attractive and plump” came and fed in the rich grass by the waters. But soon these beasts morphed into seven...
Yesterday morning the McWilliams’s kitchen table resembled a mini war room. My son and I spread out a huge map of France before us and tried to figure out Paris to Bordeaux in a camper van. We’d been up in Belfast over the weekend and had tried to coax our...
This Christmas, many of us are heading to family in different parts of the country, lots are returning home and yet more are coming back to Ireland from abroad. Conversations in houses will vary, but lots of families, particularly those from the country, will look...
A little while ago, I presented a programme on RTÉ called ‘Ireland’s Great Wealth Divide’. The aim of the documentary was to highlight the significant and persistent divide in wealth that exists in Ireland. The reason it is an important issue to...
“If the Dutch lived in Ireland, they’d feed the world; if the Irish lived in Holland, they’d drown.” Have you heard this one? How true is it? What is wrong with this country? Every time there is a short, sharp spell of rain, the place fills up to the brim and then...
