The differing approaches to major stories taken by RTE and the next largest media organisation in the state, Independent Newspapers, are highlighted in their respective coverage of yesterday’s tragedy, in which a couple in their eighties and their 40-year-old son were found dead in their farmhouse in county Wicklow.RTE seems to expect its audience to […]

It is challenge to the powers of empathy to squeeze out a tear over the fate of Baron Black of Crossharbour. Still, from an Irish judicial perspective, you might wonder whether the prospect of several decades in the clink for ripping off institutional investors and fellow plutocrats is a bit harsh. You would be hard […]

I’m feeling slightly lightheaded. This week I read a column by Kevin “Colonel” Myers that I largely agree with (although his use of the compound noun “Flynn-woman” threatens to undermine his argument with its whiff of blustering misogyny).From the Indo: “For law is not unconditionally binding to the Fianna Fail mind; it is accepted, but […]

It’s usually a sign that a subject has reached its sell-by-date when RTE’s current affairs department, as agile as a supertanker executing a U-turn, manages to consider it. In this case, it’s “peak oil” that is the subject of “Future Shock: End of the Oil Age,” presented by the station’s resident scold-in-chief, George Lee. As […]

The Dublin Writers Festival 2007 kicks off tomorrow with a stronger-than-usual lineup. However, it’s unfortunate that Adrienne Rich, by far the most significant participant, had to pull out of her event due to ill health. Still, there’s enough to pique the interest, with Lionel Shriver, Alistair MacLeod, Tim Robinson, and Iain Sinclair involved. There’s also […]

In a recent piece about the experience of tagging after the British prime minister as he makes valedictory pit-stops at evocative locales (Belfast, Washington, and, alas, Basra), Martin Amis takes a pop at blogosphere critics of Tony Blair. In a tone redolent of a colonial police report on the pidgin rhetoric of native insurgents, Amis […]

On the occasion of the launch of Google Maps Street View, the latest step in that firm’s endeavours to pixallate the known world, this blog offers a one-paragraph story by Jorge Luis Borges (with Adolfo Bioy Casares), “Of Exactitude in Science.” In a feint characteristic of Borges, this jewel of an idea is smuggled into […]

I was sufficiently impressed by Joshua Ferris’s debut, Then We Came to the End, to check out the book that inspired that somewhat sales-unfriendly title, Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (opening line: “Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year”. DeLillo, whatever his limitations, has an undeniable knack for the arresting […]

Stalled in a traffic jam snaking up one of the M50’s off-ramps this morning–only in Ireland do road planners think motorways and roundabouts mix–I caught the tail-end of RTE’s Morning Ireland. It featured a report on the canonisation of the 19th-century priest Fr. Charles of Mt. Argus, due to take place this weekend in Rome*. […]

The champagne’s being put back into cold storage. Just like all those voting machines. Martin Cullen is now back in. It’s beginning to feel like a bad zombie film…