KILLER SWANS DROWN DUBLINMAN
The killer swans lay in wait in the rushes of the Grand Canal.
VERONICA GUERIN’S SECRETS
Not long before journalist Veronica Guerin was shot dead in Dublin in 1996 we met …and she confided she was working on a particular investigation of police corruption … she and I discussed sleaze and bribery in the Garda Síochána, Ireland’s police force.
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SEASHORE VOICES
The voice from nowhere stipulates how I should take care of dog poo. I am early-walking the path behind the sea-breaker wall, close to Dublin’s Salthill train station, accompanied only by my intimate shadow and the sound of the voice of my mother.
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MICK HANLY BATTLES RAGWORT
I see singer songwriter Mick Hanley is responding positively to an Irish Arts Center invitation to perform in Manhattan New York in November while battling with Rogwort in his back garden. Is he past the point of rescue?
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THE STORY OF MOUSE LAND
You can never have enough democracy. I am a democrat with a small ‘D’. By that I mean not a US Democrat or even a Canadian Democrat as in the amusing YouTube video attached. But it is still well worth viewing.
In every other sense, like republicans of the socialist tradition, I am a democrat and believe you can never have enough democracy. This leads to the inevitable question of whether we have real democracy now. Watch The Story of Mouseland and decide.
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SHANE MAC THOMÁIS -an untimely sudden death
TALL, FIT, soft spoken with a kindly mischievous glint in his eyes Shane Mac Thomáis was hard to miss in a crowd. When I first met him around 2001 I was already acquainted with his late father, Éamon, and had avidly read and followed his father’s folksy historical media contributions, such as bestseller Me Jewel and Darlin Dublin.
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SAME BARRISTER, SAME GARDA CORRUPTION , SAME APPALLING VISTAS
Irish barrister, Martin Giblin SC, has been fighting and exposing Garda corruption cases since 1976, to date. No Surprise, he’s back in court again.
The same barrister is central to the recent exposure of the Gárda telephone recording/bugging. Nothing, it seems, has changed over the years.
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GÁRDA WHISTLE BLOWERS -a 38 year-old warning
TODAY IS THE 38th anniversary of the Gárda Heavy Gang & Sallins Mail Train Robbery Case. I know this because every year, on this date, I wake up soaked in sweat at about 5am, by way of a subconscious reminder.
This is the time I was taken from my cell, in 1976, and brought down into the tunnel under Dublin’s Bridewell police station to meet the Gárda Heavy Gang and be tortured .
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BRENDAN BEHAN -a writer with heart
On the 50th anniversary of the death of Brendan Behan It is too late to talk to him about his writing. He is dead. But he was alive when I first overheard my parents discussing him.
My father, Deasún, and Brendan, were fellow writers in among other publications, The Bell, perhaps the most important Irish literary and intellectual journal in the twentieth century. Both writers shared radical political and literary thoughts, always conversing in Irish, which they had both learnt recently, post school.
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