I have been known to have a pint or two in the same joint that Enda Kenny, who last week survived a confidence vote in his party, has been known on occasion to have a pint or two. Generally we encounter each other on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, late, when the bar is empty, and [...]
The applicant’s exam to All Souls College, Oxford University, is generally considered the most difficult exam in the world. This year it’s losing its most difficult question, in part because it’s too easy to answer. All Souls, which is not open to undergraduates, has fewer than 80 fellows, and was founded in 1438. The applicant’s [...]
The arrival of the Clongriffin Dart station has been a welcome and transformative experience for me, but the most interesting development has been the severe disdain we Clongriffinites receive from Malahide, Portmarnock and Drogheda commuters whose arduous journeys to the office now take approximately 120 more seconds and include about a dozen more people than [...]
About a week ago, after an uneasy and ultimately humiliating experience on Twitter to help me publicise my fledgling business, I ‘deactivated’ – which is to say I not only stopped tweeting, but I erased my account. I am never going back. I feel like I have been to war, and seen the depths to [...]
By the time this column appears, the British general election will be well over. As I write this, the third and final televised debate was last night. The consensus today is that David Cameron won, Nick Clegg got beaten on the issue of immigration and Gordon Brown did not do enough to save himself from [...]
Last week, a shortlist for the best Irish book of the decade was announced. Fifty books were chosen as nominees for the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards’ prize. The winner will be chosen by popular vote, and voting is now open on their website, www.irishbookawards.ie. The shortlist is pretty weird, since it combines books [...]
I travelled to Mayo for the Easter weekend. My girlfriend, my one-year-old son, my mother (who was visiting from Texas) and I went to my girlfriend’s home house (a phrase I love for its silly sound) for some relaxation in the country, and my son’s first birthday party. When my girlfriend is in Dublin, she [...]
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN last week set a record by crashing together two 3.5 trillion electronvolt proton beams, insuring that physicists will go on to discover more and more sh*t I don’t and never will understand. Scientists say the achievement, which will allow them to examine the nature of matter and the origin [...]
I’m going to the theatre this weekend, for the first time in a while. I’ve got tickets for the last show of Sodome, My Love at the Project Arts Centre, which was produced by the Rough Magic Theatre Company. By the time this column goes to press, Sodome will be finished. Heidegger said that the [...]
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