People

Once we create a system that allows the person to start again, we facilitate the return of hope. On Monday night I went for a pint with an old friend who was distressed. His wife had just lost her job and that meant there was now no way they could pay the mortgage. There wasn’t…

What is the link between Friday night snogs at a disco, grandfathers talking about cold pigs in winter to grandsons, immigrant children coming up with their own IT ideas, iPods and teenagers standing too close to the speakers at a Green Day concert? Why, the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition, of course! These everyday…

It’s 8.15am on New Year’s Eve. AC/DC’s Thunderstruck – a song that, if you have been frequenting night clubs down the country recently, you’ll have noticed has replaced Amhrán na bhFiann as the finale of choice – is blasting out on the Morning Show on Radio Nova. Over on Morning Ireland, Brian Cowen is telling…

I was on the Dart into Dublin the other morning, surrounded by students getting ready to sit the dreaded Leaving Cert this week. They were in good form, talking about big bits of the course they hadn’t a clue about. This is the sort of bravado or giddiness that precedes panic. I remember it well….

LAST week I had a great night in Limerick. I was down to host an evening of music, debate and political cabaret in the wonderful Dolan’s Warehouse. The event was organised by the Northside Learning Hub. It runs outreach programmes, working with schools and colleges to make education available to as many people in the…

Last year I remember watching the ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ programme on RTE featuring the eminently likeable Simon Delaney. The unfolding story of his grandfather in the First World War was extraordinary. Using records from the Guinness brewery, an odd mention of the British Legion in a newspaper and British military records, Delaney…

I walked by the barbers in Dalkey yesterday and for a split second I was back in the mid-1970s. I was once again the little boy with the flaming red hair, short pants and freckles looking up at the kind barber. The boy had a dilemma and the barber was the only person in the whole world who could solve it.

When I was in school there were fellas whose Mammies stood behind them with a mallet when they were filling in their CAO forms to make sure they ticked law, accountancy or medicine. The holy of holies of this type of Irish mammy was to have her son in the professions. This was what she…

On St Patrick’s Day two years ago, while nudging my way up a crammed Fifth Avenue, the idea of the Farmleigh Global Irish Forum came to me. I’d thought about it before and I had seen how other countries cultivated relationships with their global tribes — particularly the Jewish tribe and Israel — but it was only after seeing the unique outpouring of Irish America on March 17 that I knew we should do this. We should tap into the power of the tribe and see where it takes us.

Yesterday, I visited my father’s grave in Shankill. He passed away this week last year. Listening to I’m Only Sleeping by the Beatles – a song that always reminds me of him and where he is now – I looked out over the cemetery, which is an elevated site.