In 1960, a young Kenyan woman named Mary Jo arrived in the United States. She was one of about 300 students in the ‘Kennedy Airlift’ scholarship programme, and amongst her peers was a young man named Barack Hussein Obama. In 2004, the year that Obama’s son gave the keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in… read more +

Speech given at the launch of a new guide for journalists on reporting on refugee issues. I came into journalism relatively late. In early 2000, I found myself in Angola in Southern Africa, as an aid worker with an Irish NGO, where the main focus of our work was the people displaced by the Angolan… read more +

In March 1951, or perhaps it was 1952, Limerick’s cinemas all went on strike. There was a travelling theatre company going about Ireland at the time, doing Shakespeare and the odd murder mystery, and at its head was an aging, eccentric aristocrat of the theatre, the actor-manager Anew McMaster, often known simply as Mac. For… read more +

A great, but tragic, Irish leader struggles with his fate. He is the foremost Irishman of his day, though he divides the country. He is confronted by treachery, and distracted by beautiful women. And as chaos threatens to consume his world, he replies… with a song. Plays dealing with Irish politicians are rare, and Irish… read more +

“I’ve no idea what this means,” said Enda Walsh to his cast. “Why the fuck did he write that?” Walsh, a playwright, was trying his hand at directing. It wasn’t going well. The script he was directing was particularly obtuse. “Why is he clouding this all up?” Walsh asked, incredulous. “Surely, he has to explain… read more +

I’ve just had this essay published in the Dublin Review of Books: Not so dark. Africa without clichés. A review of ‘Africa’, by Richard Dowden ‘Here is Dowden’s description of Angola at the height of the civil war, in the 1980s: “a marxist regime armed by the Soviet Union and protected by Cuban troops is… read more +

Listen to a World Report on the phenomenon of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, broadcast on April 4, 2009. Below is the original text of the report. — Smile flashed me this week. Let me clarify that. ‘Flash’ is African mobile phone slang for giving someone a missed call – letting them know you want… read more +

After the Night of Broken Glass in Germany, in November 1938, the Department of Foreign Affairs sought a report from our man in Berlin. Almost 100 Jews had been murdered in the Kristallnacht pogrom, and thousands of businesses ransacked. The tiny Berlin legation was headed by Charles Bewley. His report back made no mention of… read more +

It was any girl’s dream: young Molly Allgood, just 19 years old, an assistant at Switzer’s drapery, was about to make her debut on the Abbey stage. As she waited nervously in the wings, the stage manager called out, “beginners please”. And Molly dissolved in tears. It was the conventional call for the actors to… read more +

In 1957, at the age of 32, Anna Manahan found herself at the centre of one of the greatest controversies in Irish theatre history when she didn’t drop a condom on stage. The alleged condom was in fact an envelope; the script she was playing, Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Rose Tattoo’, called for a condom to… read more +