Happy Ivy Day 2024! Ivy Day is the annual commemoration of Charles Stewart Parnell, the "uncrowned king" of Ireland who came close to winning Home Rule for Ireland. He died on this day in 1891. Every year since then, there's been a commemoration at his grave in Glasnevin cemetery. It used to be a big deal (a long time ago), but it's a pretty subdued affair now. There's a speech by a dignitary, a wreath-laying, and a piper playing a tune or two. As my readers will now, I'm mad about the traditions, especially neglected and minor traditions. So for many years, I meant to attend the Ivy Day comme ..read more

  I've just finished reading The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics by Bruce Schulamn. It held my interest from beginning to end. I don't think there's really more of a compliment you can pay to a book, unless it's that you return to it. I've been fascinated by the seventies all my life. Here's a blog post I wrote about the atmosphere of the seventies. Are such musings of interest to anyone else? Maybe not. But that's the benefit of a blog; you can write about things that might or might not be of interest to other people. I love everything about the seven ..read more

I post a lot of stuff on Facebook. It's mostly miscellaneous musings, ideas that strike me throughout the day. Now and again it strikes me that my blog readers might be interested in some of them. Here goes. I really dislike this campaign. So that's not us. OK. Who ARE we, then? It seems to me that today's Ireland (and not just Ireland) is trying to construct an identity based on negatives, or at the best, abstractions like 'inclusivity". Is this really possible? I remember in sixth class in school, when I was 11 or 12, I wrote a "column" with the title Bald Hawk Pool (a fanciful translation ..read more

I've been watching this video with Jimmy Akin and a vlogger called The Religious Hippie and it's led me to wonder if I've ever really evangelized. I've written a lot about Catholicism in various media and I certainly speak to people about my faith. I don't know for sure that I've led a single person any closer to the Faith. I suppose we are not required to succeed, only to try. I hope I have not done the opposite. I was glad to hear Jimmy Akin talk about "soft evangelization", which is what he does with his Mysterious World podcast. I know a lot of content on this blog isn't explicitly religio ..read more

 What are you doing on the 24th of October? If the answer to that is "nothing", why not come to the launch of my friend Jonathan Barry's book Great Classic Stories in Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street? You can read an interview with Jonathan about the book here. I will be there, still recovering from the gala celebrations of my 47th birthday on the 22nd. (I wish ..read more

I spent a sleepless hour or two after midnight, this weekend, coming up with this list.  Why fifty? Well, it seems a manageable sort of number. Despite the title of the post, I can't really claim this is my definitive fifty favourite poems. In another mood, at another time, it might have looked somewhat different. But these are all poems which have a huge personal significance to me, lines from which regularly come unbidden into my memory, and (most importantly) which move me immensely. Most of them are poems that I've loved for decades now. I can't even imagine my life without some of th ..read more

Readers of this blog are invited to a talk by Emily de Rotstein on “Celebrating 150 years: How GK Chesterton continues to ‘evangelise’ through education”. Saturday 7th September, 12 pm Central Catholic Library 74 Merrion Square, Dublin 2 Emily de Rotstein serves as Executive Director of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a worldwide lay apostolate established in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The mission of the Society is to evangelise through education, inspiring people to live joyful, holy lives, with G.K. Chesterton as a model of lay spirituality. The Society runs t ..read more

Would you like to read an original horror story I've just written? It involves an attic, a diary, and a face from the distant past. That kind of thing. It's 3,500 words long. If so, please email me at Maolsheachlann@gmail.com ..read more

I received this email sixteen hours ago: Dear Customer, On behalf of Toomey Audio Visual, I wanted to reach out to you with some exciting company news – we have recently been acquired by Stacked Group. Should you not be familiar, Stacked is one of Ireland’s leading suppliers of AV & Digital Signage, IT Hardware, Managed Print Services and Workplace Supplies. The company was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in the Red Cow Dublin, with an all-Ireland presence and over 85 local staff members. The acquisition is strategically well-timed and will help to further enhance the service and pr ..read more

Last night I dreamt I went to Ballymun again. Well, not really. I can't remember what I dreamt about last night. But I often do dream I'm back in Ballymun. Not just in Ballymun, but in Ballymun as it used to be, the Ballymun I grew up in, back in the eighties and early nineties. Although even that's not quite true. Generally, the Ballymun I dream about is an imaginative reworking of that "classic" Ballymun; sometimes a very imaginative reworking. I have a recurring dream about a sort of space-age Ballymun, when the flats have been transformed into gleaming white indoor cities with all sorts of ..read more