The Miltown Christmas
Buzz
I’m in a good pub in Miltownmalbay the other night and I don’t have
to go home. There is a warm Miltown bed awaiting me when the night
is over. more... |
(Irish Voice) 21 December
2005
|
The Gypsy’s Magic Fiddle
He was playing his fiddle on the edge of the farmer’s market and
both the instrument and the musician were eye-catching. He looked
like a traveller. more... |
(Irish Voice) 14 December
2005
|
Our Shocking Sexy Secrets
The Dutch Nation came home with yet another book under her arm and
a wide smile on her beautiful face. more... |
(Irish Voice) 7 December
2005
|
He Truly Was the Best
And on an afternoon just like this, the sun shining, a white Rolls
Royce glided out of Dublin Airport with two wee men from Ulster
in the plush back seat. more... |
(Irish Voice) 30 November
2005
|
Paradise Is Still
Amazing
I returned to Paradise last week. I had an amazing few hours there,
in that fabled townland above the Shannonside village of Ballinacally.
more...
|
(Irish Voice) 28 November
2005
|
From Misery
to Cheer, And . . .
It being the month of November, bleak enough now too, I was going
to write something for ye about death and misery and desolation
and wet rushes and skinny cattle and rain. I even had it in the
dark corner of my head that probably I go into too often in winter.
more...
|
(Irish Voice) 16 November
2005
|
Sheep
and the Price of Land
A WICKED wind scourges the town of Ennistymon from one end to the
other. There’s heavy rain in its mouth.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 02 November
2005
|
The Tourists and the Trees
I’ve an hour to kill. I’m coming back from Limerick where a Cork
man was fixing a sick laptop for me for three days.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 02 November
2005
|
The Workings of an Informer
How it works is that when McNeill has something to pass on he drives
the bullocks down into the Red Garden, which is beside the main
road to the town. That night he goes down quietly in the dark, without
a light at all, and tosses the loose portion of the stone wall beside
the gate into the field. more... |
(Irish Voice) 26 October
2005
|
Cork Is Tiring, But Beautiful
I’m in Cork City for the weekend. The Dutch Nation has business
to attend to there and I come along in her car.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 19 October
2005
|
Blackguards
& Pigs at the Fair
The town clipped and the town clopped and it was mighty. There is
still no finer experience in autumnal Ireland than the Ballinasloe
Horse Fair on the first Monday of each October. more... |
(Irish Voice) 12 October
2005
|
Can’t
Beat the Human Touch
The factory has been on the industrial estate outside the town for
more than 40 years now. more... |
(Irish Voice) 28 September
2005
|
Wake Up, Maggie!
They have a lovely saying over in West Clare to cover the matter
of temptation. What they say is, “The Devil picked at me!”
more... |
(Irish Voice) 21 September
2005
|
Our Melting Pot Runneth
Over
This cottage is 150 years old. I sat outside it last evening at
dusk. The evenings are getting a little shorter, just a fraction
cooler as well. The windfalls bleed beneath my old Beauty of Bath
apple tree.more... |
(Irish Voice) 14 September
2005
|
Beware
the Dirty Season
AH, we are in the heart of the Silly Season now in Ireland, the
politicians on holiday, the last roses of summer near enough the
bud stage. more... |
(Irish Voice) 07 September
2005
|
Publishing
Wars in Clare
It was either Annett or some other member of her Dutch family that
told me some years ago about the lifestyle of a community of hardy
small farmers living in the borderlands of modern Germany and Holland
for a couple of centuries up to the late 18th century or thereabouts.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 31 August 2005
|
A Potential American
Idol
Not often do I venture into the showbusiness area. When I do, in
fairness, it’s because I’m powerfully impressed by some group or
some artist I’ve heard over here.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 24 August 2005
|
Smelly,
Funny Mountains
August might well be a wicked month, as Edna O’Brien claimed in
one of her novels a decade ago, but it is certainly a strange one.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 17 August 2005
|
A Real
Texan Hero
I don't argue that sport often transcends life. I do claim that
there are many occasions when sport enmeshes with, and graphically
illustrates the realities of life.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 10 August 2005
|
The Creepy Spider Attacks
A searing July day, the kind we are not bred for at all, with the
shorn meadows shining white, the sky cloudless and without wind,
willow bushes blanched yellow along the sides of the dusty sideroads
of east Clare. more... |
(Irish Voice) 27 July 2005
|
Trees
Are the Measure of a Man
There's something about the way a certain kind of small man enters
a pub that instantly alerts you to the fact that he is barred from
the premises. more... |
(Irish Voice) 20 July 2005
|
Hearse Planes and Sad Skies
Thousands of your living and hundreds of your dead soldiers are
coming home through Shannon for the last weeks and months.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 13 July 2005
|
Silly Season Has Arrived!
Scorchingly, suddenly, surreally, it’s the high summer silly season
and I love this lazy hazy time of the year.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 6 July 2005
|
|
Kilfenora History
for Sale
I went into Linnane’s fabled pub in Kilfenora village the other
evening, dropping down through the sundrenched stonelands past Kilnaboy
of the explicitly lewd Sheela-na-Gig, and past the great castle
of Red Maire on the high road to Carron on the top of the Burren.
more...
|
(Irish Voice) 29 June 2005
|
Life
Is So Magical
Strangely I remember having the real bad day about two years ago,
and the detail of the day is gone from me except that I had to wear
a suit and tie and came home in a sweltering car, lividly cursing
and swearing. more... |
(Irish Voice) 22 June 2005
|
Honey Never Tasted So Sweet
If we begin, and we will, with mention of Letitia Thistlewaite’s
Special Organic Heather Honey, we must go back much further than
the establishment of those goldenly unique hives below the mountain
to truly begin this yarn.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 15 June 2005
|
Granny’s
Fairies Never Grow Old
Once upon a time, when we were wee, our Granny Lizzie would read
us the mighty fairy stories of Ireland most evenings before we’d
go to bed. more... |
(Irish Voice) 8 June 2005
|
A Trip Through Memory Lane
Nostalgia in the Dublin night before the weekend when about 400
of us old Irish Press people joined together for a kinda wake to
mark the 10th anniversary of the passing of the Old Lady of Burgh
Quay. more... |
(Irish Voice) 1 June 2005
|
Rainbow Outshines Them
All
I’m coming back through lovely Leitrim by choice. I’m listening
on the car radio to the news that the buccaneering Malcolm Glazer
has seized control of Manchester United, the soccer club so beloved
of so many Irish.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 25 May 2005
|
|
Comforts
of the Cuckoo
I heard the first cuckoo of my year an hour ago. In Connemara you
usually saw her and heard her at the same time, the grayblue shape
of her being harried fiercely by two or three smaller dunnocks or
sparrows or tits who knew, somewhere inside their feathers, that
she’d poach a place in their nests if she got half a chance.
more...
|
(Irish Voice) 18 May 2005
|
We’re
Evil . . . But Funny!
We MacConnells are indeed a strange and possibly even evil clan.
Mickie my brother phoned this morning from Kerry, from the wordsmith
town of Listowel where great works have been written down the years
by men like Keane and McMahon and Gaughan and all the rest whose
chapters and verses built Listowel’s flourishing annual Writer’s
Week. more... |
(Irish Post) 11 May 2005
|
From Hack to Grandpa
Who did I meet this week in my meanderings? First, and he will not
remember it, I met my first grandson Aodhan, and I will remember
it forever, for ‘tis a hallmark of life, is it not?
more... |
(Irish Voice) 4 May 2005
|
Keep Croke Park All-Irish!
It was as bad a bloody weekend as I can remember. The sodden weather
in Ireland two weekends ago was matched by my reaction to the news
from Croke Park in Dublin that the hallowed portals built by the
green shillings and sixpences of my father’s generation are to be
thrown open, sometime soon, to what they always called “foreign
games.” more... |
(Irish Voice) 27 April 2005
|
The Power of the Crucifix
A young neighbor is expecting her first baby any of these fine days.
I went over to her an hour ago and gave her Father Willie Doyle
in his little green velvet bag.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 20 April 2005
|
Hannah the Friendly Ghost
March marches manfully into a golden evening and so do I.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 13 April 2005
|
Hannah the Friendly Ghost
March marches manfully into a golden evening and so do I.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 13 April 2005
|
Papal Blessings from Sandy
Speaking of popes and papal matters — and isn’t everybody these
days, and God rest the brave old man who has gone to God about a
year after his painful time — I don’t think I ever told ye the story
about how my father Sandy used to hand out papal blessings to all
and sundry in our country shop away back.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 6 April 2005
|
Don’t Mess With the Bouncers
They have a long and rich and fiery history, have the Bouncers of
Knocklong parish in Limerick, a parish of old castles and churches
and raths and forts and ancient battlefields. And some not so ancient
at all. more...
|
(Irish Voice) 30 March 2005
|
Beware the Maneaters!
A few days before Easter and it’s raining soft rain but a gentle
night, warm and kind. Earlier in the evening the first bees and
butterflies of my spring danced in molten sunbeams.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 23 March 2005
|
A
Child’s Memories
I remember my first wake. I think I was seven or eight years old.
The wake was for Pat Maguire, who was married to my father’s only
sister Mary Ellen. more...
|
(Irish Voice) 17 March 2005
|
The City of Stents
So I’m in Skippol Airport in Amsterdam a week or so ago and I’m
heading for the pleasure of a smoking bar after a smokeless flight,
and on the way there’s a pretty girl handing out freebie copies
of The Financial Times. I take one.
more... |
(Irish Voice)
9 March 2005
|
Two Octogenarian Warriors
In the one ten minutes on TV an hour ago I saw two of the toughest
pensioners you would care to meet. Octogenarians, both of them,
and one the sworn enemy of the other, but neither of them even thinking
about retiring and drawing the pension anytime soon.
more... |
(Irish Voice)
2 March 2005
|
The
Bad New Times
How's this for a country? There are lads found away down in Cork
burning tens of thousands of pounds in bonfires in their back gardens!
There are other lads leaving millions of euros in their compost
bins in the backyards to, presumably, convert them into manure.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 24 February
2005
|
Rats!
The End of Radio
Ah, my briefly flickering radio career is over. Ah, woe is me. I
will never be a Gay Byrne or a Garrison Keillor! Or even a Terry
Wogan. more... |
(Irish Voice) 17 February
2005
|
Saying Her
Peace Before Death
She had a heart of gold, they always said, a heart of pure gold.
A heart of corn, said Sean Armstead, but then he always said things
just a little different.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 10 February
2005
|
Tracing the
Night Away
It was about 10 o’clock on the Friday night, very few in the bar,
when Dinny Corcoran and Paddy Downes, with a small input every now
and then from Sudden, started the ancient art of tracing.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 3 February
2005
|
True Story,
Happy Ending
Truth is richer, rawer, rarer, far far stranger than fiction. Listen
to this now: There’s this lovely housewife and mother called May
De Loughrey living in Pound Street in Kilrush away back in the hungry
1940s(...)
more... |
(Irish Voice) 26 January
2005
|
Always Mind
the Boundaries
Connolly cursed richly when he looked out the window in the morning
and saw that the five bullocks were gone from the hill opposite.(...)
more... |
(Irish Voice) 19 January
2005
|
The People You
Meet
I’m in Cruise’s Pub in Ennis three evenings ago and I’m fighting
off a flu and feeling not the best.(...)
more... |
(Irish Voice) 13 January
2005
|
Smokers Won’t
Forgive or Forget
“FORGIVENESS is the sweetest revenge!” That is what was written
on the first page of my calendar for 2005.
more... |
(Irish Voice) 5 January 2005
|
