TMO is, in part, an Irish magazine, so it’s no surprise we’re interested in Irish culture. We term culture broadly, so you’ll find articles/essays/posts grouped here on Irish history (including our popular essays on the Irish war of indpendence), Irish writers (interviews with contemporary writers alongside profile and criticism for authors like James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Sean O’Casey and many more), Irish music (reviews and interviews with the likes of Glen Hansard, Luka Bloom, Bell X-1, the Dubliners to name but a few). And we’ll throw in some shamrocks, and St Patrick’s day stories to keep up with passing stereotypes!
As the world and his wife, in Joycean terms, turn their attention to Dublin, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the fictional event of Bloomsday, it seems almost as if a lone Irish voice is reminding us that Joyce wrote most of his work outside of Ireland, and in particular a large part of it […]
Anyone who has caught “Reeling in the Years,” RTE’s knock-off of the BBC’s “The Rock’n’Roll Years”, in which contemporary music is spliced in with archive news footage would quickly be reminded that Ireland in the 1980s was a basket case. Moving statues, hunger strikes, mass emigration, and Miami Vice-style jackets all featured prominently in the […]
Geoffrey Beattie is a Professor at the Department of Psychology in the University of Manchester. A native of north Belfast, he was later educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He has written a memoir of his life growing up during the Troubles of the 1960s and '70s, called Protestant Boy (Granta). Mark Harkin met Geoffrey during […]
(Editor’s note – this email interview was conducted before news broke that long time Therapy? member, Martin McCarrick was leaving the band) Recently, while browsing through the web-site for famous Amsterdam club The Paradiso, I stumbled upon a live broadcast of Therapy? I watched intrigued, as it’s been some years since I’d seen anything from […]
I’m late turning up for the interview, thanks to the summer time clock change, but director Mark Brozel is unfazed and welcoming. He’s quietly spoken and pensive throughout the interview, often pausing to reflect on the answers, to give them due weight. His film Holy Cross received an enthusiastic reception at the fourth international Human […]
“Surfing in Ireland?!? SURFING in IRELAND? Are you sure?!?” It's rocky, rough, cold and wet! Well, honestly… people DO surf in Ireland and I have to confess, it is one of the most consistent surfing areas in Europe and it has some seriously good waves! There's something I have to explain first. Surfers are a […]
Dublin Band The Frames – fronted by Glen Hansard, in interview Over a number of years, and with a number of Albums to their credit, The Frames have developed into one of Ireland’s best loved rock bands. Formed around the nucleus of singer/songwriter Glen Hansard (who, though he may wish to forget it, played the […]
This year is the centenary of “Bloomsday” – celebrated in James Joyce’s Ulysses. We ask Senator David Norris – why the fuss? Every year in Dublin on 16 June, people celebrate James Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses, by re-enacting the journeys of its central characters, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. With many participants dressed in Edwardian […]
Students of Anglo-Irish literature and Irish history may be interested to learn that their studies could be markedly different were it not for the phenomenon of Asperger’s syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism. Professor Michael Fitzgerald from the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin has uncovered a link between levels of […]
Tim Pat Coogan describes interviewing Flann O’Brien in 1964 after the publication of The Dalkey Archive. The interview was carefully planned. Apart from getting him to talk, there was one other main objective: to keep O’Brien away from the drink. It was to take place at 8.30 on a Saturday morning so that he could […]
