I know, I know. Liam Neeson is a 65-year-old rich, white, male movie star. I shouldn’t be disappointed that he seems completely out of touch on the #MeToo movement, but God Almighty, Liam.
I had the Late Late Show on...
In August 2016, the then US president Barack Obama, did something that seemed at the time extraordinary. He straight-out said that the then Republican presidential candidate, the erratic, petulant, proudly-ignorant, multiple-bankrupt, self-confessed serial sexual abuser and race-baiting demagogue Donald Trump,...
I confess I got a genuine belly-laugh from the front page of the Irish Examiner on Stephen Zuss Day.
The second lead story - by Elaine Loughlin - was entitled “Taoiseach concerned over ‘cult status’ of Scientology”. The first...
Brian O’Connell lost one of his closest friends – the singer and musician Brian Carey - to suicide this year. In a new RTÉ Radio One documentary, he speaks about his loss and explores his own reaction to grief....
Last Christmas Eve, I visited the grave of Santa Claus.
The first thing to say, of course, is that Santa Claus does not – and cannot – have a grave.
Santa Claus cannot die and Santa Claus never will die. Santa is...
“I won’t survive another winter on the streets,” Kathleen O’Sullivan told me, as she lay in the doorway in which she would die a month later.
It was a cold Friday night in early November, and I was out on...
Martyn Turner, the brilliant Irish Times cartoonist, told a story during the dark days of the Troubles. If memory serves, Turner had given a lecture at an exhibition of his cartoons in the United States. From the audience came...
“My uncle sexually abused me,” said the pale young man sitting begging on a Cork street. “Speaking out cost me everything.”
I won’t tell you the young man’s name, or his precise age, and I won’t tell you his home...
‘Little Nellie of Holy God’, Cork’s unofficial patron saint, was four and a half years old when she died in 1908. Her short life was marked by severe pain and extreme religious devotion. Her knowledge of Catholic doctrine and...
November 1833. As the night skies explode in blazing light over America’s Deep South, the slavers on one plantation – terrified of the end of the world – attempt to make restitution to those they have enslaved.
Every year, in...
