Patricia’s Blog
This morning I watched online as crowds at Newgrange gathered to experience the coincidence of a winter solstice and lunar eclipse only to be disappointed when snow clouds prevented the blended light of sun and moon from seeping though the passage tomb. Out the window a blackbird chases a robin from the bread I’ve left under…
Read MoreIn 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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read MoreI’ve nothing to say. What would I write about anyhow? My grammar would be all wrong. They’d laugh at me. All this at a recent writing class. And then there was a tea-break and the chat and the story-telling started and could have gone on all night. So you want to write but just can’t…
Read More
I recently came on this video with a Halloween flavour. The Banshee lives in the Handball Alley was recorded five years ago by artists Micheal Fortune and Aileen Lambert in three Limerick schools as part of Limerick’s CUISLE Poetry and EV+A Festivals in 2004 and 2005. Sit back and enjoy the ghostly tales of banshees, headless…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
I was back in my childhood places – the village of Greenwood and the parish of Bekan – in East Mayo at the week-end and heard talk of a strange walk the previous Sunday when about 60 people gathered, I’m told, and made their way through fields and paths in Larganboy, Lassany and Lissaniska. It’s part of the En…
Read More