The lonely city in The Visitor by Maeve Brennan

About halfway through Maeve Brennan’s novella The Visitor, the author comments on the two worlds that exist within the landscape of a city. She distinguishes these two worlds by describing them as, the one with walls around it, meaning the private interior world of the home, and the one with people around it, which is the public...

Maeve Brennan: Ireland’s greatest forgotten writer

“Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness."   The above quote is from Maeve Brennan's novella The Visitor and was my first introduction to her. I discovered...

A look at youth culture in Irish film and television: 2003-2017

In 2016-17, I completed an MA in English, specialising in Irish Writing and Film, at University College Cork. As part of the course, everyone in my class was required to set up and regularly update a blog. The idea of the blog initially filled my classmates and me with dread, as blogging was completely uncharted territory for...

Picnic at Hanging Rock: “The arse end of the world.” Colonialism and escape in the Australian wilderness

In the late summer of 2018, RTÉ 2 aired the Australian set period drama Picnic at Hanging Rock. An adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel of the same name, the six-part series tells the story of the disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher in 1900 Australia. This is the second major screen adaptation of...

Top Five Irish Podcasts

In the last decade, the podcast industry has grown to become one of the most popular forms of audio entertainment. With the rise of smartphones and iPods, podcasts have allowed for a portable and accessible way to listen to long-form conversations and interviews. In Ireland, some of the recent developments in the field have been...

Rewind: Looking back at David Gleeson’s Cowboys and Angels

A profile of David Gleeson's 2003 comedy-drama. Contains some spoilers. Set in Limerick city during the boom years, Cowboys and Angels depicts the growing friendship between two very different men and looks at the anxieties and challenges faced by young people trying to establish their identity in a modern city.  When shy civil servant Shane...

Beyond ‘Hip Hedonism’: The darker side of urban Celtic Tiger Ireland

In his 2007 essay "Cinema, city, and imaginative space: 'Hip hedonism' and recent Irish cinema", McLoone outlines how the relative prosperity and optimism of the Celtic Tiger years led a cultural rebirth of Dublin, and a re-imagining of Ireland's capital in film as a space of "sexual freedom and exploration" (213). Films like Goldfish Memory...

‘Living, in our own terrible way.’* The disorientation of Ireland’s youth culture in contemporary film and television

Through a series of blog posts, I will explore how contemporary Irish film and television portray the difficulties faced by young Irish men and women. The last few years have seen a string of Irish films and TV series that portray a darker side of Irish life with issues like depression, alcohol and drug abuse, alienation,...