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You really have no right to want anything from me at all
Nobody’s fucking laughing now. In her memoir, Sinéad O’Connor recollects writing this single sentence in English class, in response to Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’. Nobody’s laughing now, either. Since July 2023, they’ve been keening, lamenting the loss of the ‘Irish Princess.’ In a country that prefers its poets internationally canonised and safely dead, Sinéad has……
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Learning any single thing: poems in the classroom, and vice versa
I’ve been trying to resurrect my Irish language skills during this latest lockdown. Over the last few years, ‘use more Irish’ has been a New Year’s resolution that hasn’t lasted past the feast of the Epiphany, but this year I’ve really been trying. There are apps involved, notebooks filling up with vocab lists, and podcasts……
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Uncantation 3: ‘the old sad tragedies of our past history’
I had the formative misfortune of receiving my primary education in an Irish, rural, two-teacher school in the 1980s. While corporal punishment was criminalised in 1982, the year before I made my First Communion, in many other respects my educational experience could have taken place at any time from the foundation of the state. The……