Published in the Sunday Tribune, July 13, 2008 In the drawing room of a house on Dublin’s Northside, Rita Dunne sits, remembering. How her father mentored her young husband, Willie, early in his political career. How Willie rose fast through the ranks, with her at his side, to become Taoiseach. How their marriage couldn’t weather… read more +

Published in the Sunday Tribune, July 6, 2008 In the Gents before opening night of ‘The Sanctuary Lamp’, two gentlemen were recalling the original production of the play, from 1975. This is a particular habit of Tom Murphy’s audiences, and it is difficult to leave a Tom Murphy play without overhearing at least one conversation… read more +

Published in the Sunday Tribune, June 8, 2008 “I struggled out of the water, into the rescue boat. “After some minutes, they brought out my woman. She was already dead. “Then, after some minutes, they brought out my baby. Dead too.” Eric Onaginu paid a trafficker €2,600 to ferry himself, his wife, Pat, and their… read more +

Aid, Trade and the Angolan Kleptocracy From the Dublin Review of Books, Summer 2008 In early 2001, in a small meeting room in a rehabilitated building in the town of Kuito, in Bié province in Angola, the local security officer for the United Nations told us of a new government policy that was likely to… read more +

This was the year when immigrants got themselves a mayor, a minister, and a voice on the Irish stage. As in politics, so too in the theatre: most of the talking for immigrants is being done by the Irish – but not all.

It is six hours before Mark O’Rowe’s play, ‘Terminus’, opens in New York. Eileen Walsh is standing in a dim crossbeam, shrouded in mist, talking out to the audience. Mark O’Rowe is coughing. A technician is talking loudly. A couple of others are looking at dimly-lit laptops, or moving quietly through the gloom, fixing things. “The drill for several years has been bed alone, then tears.” Eileen Walsh plays against the rhythm of O’Rowe’s verse. She lets the rhyme announce itself, as if her character were unaware that there were anything distinctive about her speech.

‘The Order of the Phoenix Park’ by ‘Twenty Major’ is the worst book I have ever finished. Admittedly, I made it just 50 pages into ‘The Da Vinci Code’, which this satirises, and about the same into the first Ross O’Carroll Kelly book, which this apes. Between them, those books sold approximately 40,100,000 copies, worldwide…. read more +

At the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Published in Irish Theatre Magazine. At the core of Jason Byrne’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is a scene that is, more typically, neglected: Juliet’s feigned suicide. It comes after a first half that bustles and bristles, theatre of swaying hips and preying hipsters. Then, after the interval, this early exuberance is… read more +

At the Gate Theatre, February 2009. Published in the Sunday Tribune. This play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. Tennessee Williams’s analysis, not mine. He gives those lines, more or less, to his narrator, Tom, at the beginning of ‘The Glass Menagerie’, just opened… read more +

Eugene McCartan was worried. There was water running into his old Temple Bar shop, and the upstairs floors had been colonised by pigeons. The bank wouldn’t give him any money. He needed a partnership with a builder, but none of those he spoke to were interested