As the media and political system obsessed with the question of Irish sovereignty, late last year, in one area at least we were still in control of affairs, and running them well. Irish theatre had a good year, one of the best in my time covering it. Theatre companies responded to more difficult circumstances with… read more +

It was a Dickensian night in Dublin as we hustled towards the Grand Canal Theatre, skating under the shadows of empty buildings, and reeling from the austerity of the budget and the winter. Rarely can the story of A Christmas Carol have been told in more auspicious a context. As poor Bob Cratchit (Morgan Crowley)… read more +

I had been thinking about the trip ahead for eight years, and had spent €5,000 to get here. And now, just as I was about to start, I felt like quittin I was standing at a dusty border crossing in the very south of Angola, in southern Africa. Trucks heading north trundled past, accelerating away… read more +

A new documentary film by Colin Murphy, with stills photography by Guy Tillim (as below), screening on Thursday September 23 on RTE One, at 10.50pm, and on the RTE Player at www.rte.ie/player.

Paper is dead. The culprit is, oddly, an oversize phone that doesn’t make phone calls. It could also be described as a computer that doesn’t run computer programmes (at least, not as we know the. It’s supposedly a good device for email, but it doesn’t have a keyboard. Every developer and media company out there… read more +

There are two kinds of ghost village in Ireland. Each is the legacy of over-reliance on an exotic and apparently endless resource. In the 1800s, Francis Drake’s potato rapidly became the staple crop of the Irish peasant. Nutritious, bountiful and resilient, it could support families on tiny parcels of land, and new settlements extended far… read more +

At 31, Brendan Behan had been drinking for 23 years, had spent seven years in jail, had tried to kill two gardaí, and had written one hit play. At 41, he was dead. Behan was the classic case of the Irish writer destroyed by drink and demons. Though his literary reputation was built on the… read more +

Two years after Flann O’Brien penned the obituary for his one-time drinking companion, Brendan Behan, O’Brien too was dead. Behan and O’Brien were two of “a generation of Irish writers who plunged themselves recklessly into the lotus-eating atmosphere of Dublin pubbery,” as Ulick O’Connor put it. Along with Patrick Kavanagh, they effectively drank themselves to… read more +

Johannesburg was a city where you could have been advised to carry a pickhandle. I managed to stay out of trouble myself, but one one occasion saw a gun being drawn on someone, and was threatened with one on another. My flat was on the first floor of an old detached house in a once… read more +

Here’s a piece of advice they won’t tell you on a creative writing degree course: “Being a plasterer is a good job if you want to write plays.” But then, John McManus is not a very conventional playwright. He doesn’t read plays. He’s barely seen any. (Ten, in his life, he thinks.) He hasn’t studied… read more +