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 +

Deirdre Kinahan was walking in the bog near her home in Meath one morning when a flash of colour caught her eye. The bog is a vast expanse of dark browns and purples and blues, and the bright colours seemed incongruous. She approached, and saw that they were flowers. Attached to the flowers was a… read more +

Mike Daisey’s bid to understand the global financial crisis took him not to the heart of Wall St, or the City of London, or the hedge fund mecca of Dublin’s IFSC, but to a tiny volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific. The story of how, and why, he got there makes up what… read more +

What do a pair of Bulgarian truckers and a female Indian call-centre worker have in common? And what have they got to do with the theatre? They were three of the most disarming performers I’ve seen in recent years. And they were brought to the Dublin stage by the same theatre company, an intriguing German… read more +

There was a scrum outside the entrance to the Abbey Theatre, but it wasn’t for tickets. There were raised voices, and a knot of people pushed against the glass doors. It looked like it could get ugly. But it was simply the free market in action. At the centre of the group, a man was… read more +

One of the most famous lines in theatre is just two words long: “A handbag?” It comes early in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a masterpiece of comic wordplay and barbed social satire. (For review of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Gaiety, see here.) And yet the line isn’t particularly funny,… read more +