Patricia’s Blog
In Mark O’Rowe’s feverish 2007 drama, Terminus, there is an image of a man dangling from one of the multitude of construction cranes on the Dublin skyline. The crane became an icon of construction-fuelled Celtic Tiger Ireland. The post below conjures the nostalgic image of Christmas festive lights on a construction crane smiling warmly…
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This is my half-dozen list of books from Ireland or by Irish writers that I think would make great Christmas gifts. And not a whiff of misery writing about the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger or the sorry IMF/ECB bailout. Emma Donoghue’s Room was my book of the year before it won the Hughes & Hughes…
Read MoreWorld Book Night | A million reasons to read a book. Welcome to World Book Night. The inaugural World Book Night will take place on Saturday, 5 March 2011, two days after World Book Day. With the full support of the Publishers Association, the Booksellers Association, the Independent Publishers Guild, the Reading Agency with…
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I seemed to loop my way around the North of Ireland to make my first visit to Inishkeen and the Patrick Kavanagh Festival this weekend. I first travelled north by Ben Bulben to Letterkenny, past mile after mile of election hoardings for that day’s by-election; my destination a North West Words event at Cafe Blend, Letterkenny, that has to be…
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This Irish Citizen found hope from an unexpected source in a week when four children died violently in rooms at their homes and the IMF and ECB arrived in Ireland. My source of hope came from Emma Donoghue’s novel Room. In a 12-ft square room where a sky-light gives the only glimpse of the outside world, a young…
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I didn’t get to the Rolling Sun Book Festival in Westport this week-end. Only heard about it late in the day and was intrigued by the title. It seems that at certain times of the year the sun appears to roll down the side of the mountain on the nearby Croagh Patrick. I spent my childhood…
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The Irish story is bad and getting worse if we are to believe Morgan Kelly in today’s Irish Times. Maybe it’s time to get some perspective – and some solace – from our history. We can do it online through The Irish Story, a digital first publisher of concise ebooks and short, snappy features on Irish…
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Paul Henry’s ‘The Bog Road’ was sold at auction during the week to an anonymous bidder a century after the artist arrived on Achill Island, the setting for the painting, and stayed on and off for almost a decade, endlessly absorbed with the colour and variety of the island’s cloud formations. Henry had a fascination with writing and…
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Christy Moore’s song ‘Lisdoonvarna’ made The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry in a week that was disturbing and surreal. We tried to get our heads and imaginations around 50 billion – the cost of bailing out Irish banks. We said fifty thousand million very slowly but that didn’t seem to make it any more real, just more frightening. And…
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