Journalist, author, broadcaster
In May, ‘the Rocky Road to Poland’, Ireland’s official song for the European Championships, debuted at number one in the Irish singles chart. A rather cumbersome 9/8 beat aside, the Rocky Road to Poland is standard team song fare: a mix of famous faces (the Dubliners), folksy humour (rhyming ‘Opel Corsa’ with ‘Warsaw’) and winsome, […]
In 1928, the scion of 20th century British economics John Maynard Keynes addressed a room full of Cambridge undergraduates on the subject of ‘economic possibilities for our grandchildren’. Keynes – a far more radical thinker than contemporary caricatures of him as the stolid grandfather of ‘tax and spend’ economics suggest – told his audience that, thanks […]
In December 1946, the French polymath and bon vivant Boris Vian, and his wife, threw a soirée in their Paris apartment. It was a boozy, bawdry affair, an intentional throwback to the all-night parties that raged in Occupied Paris. In one corner sat phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, across the room was his bête noire, the author Arthur Koestler. Simone de […]
‘HIS PEN could lay bare the bones of a book or the soul of a statesman in a few vivid lines”. These words were written in praise of the man who founded the Sun newspaper: journalist, politician and Irish nationalist, TP O’Connor. The inscription appears, etched in brass, below a bust of a hirsute O’Connor […]
LEGAL action over an interview with a former IRA member may threaten our ability to record history, writes Peter Geoghegan. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” These words, penned more than a century ago by Spanish-American poet and essayist George Santayana, could have been written about Northern Ireland today. So […]
Iceland is often held up as the poster child for an alternative approach to the global crisis, but how accurate are the stories about the Nordic nation? My London Review of Books blog took a look. In April, a video entitled ‘Iceland forgives mortgage debt of its population’ went viral. The 30-second clip, a Spanish-language news broadcast […]
IF you had wanted to see the movers and shakers in Edinburgh this week, it would have cost you £3,850, writes Peter Geoghegan If you did find yourself with just shy of four grand burning a hole in your pocket, would you spend it all on a ticket for a four-day conference on “radical openness”? […]
Below is a long-form piece on heroin in my home town of Longford, and the paucity of treatment facilities for addicts, which originally appeared in July 1 edition of the Sunday Business Post. He smiles when he recalls the first time he used. It was 1995 and he was 17, just out of secondary school […]
Give independent scholars their funding due, says Peter Geoghegan: while the academy is ‘rethinking’, they are busy doing. Credit: Miles Cole A few years ago, I attended a panel discussion on “the challenge of non-university researchers”, held at Queen’s University Belfast. The British Academy-sponsored event boasted a venerable roster of speakers addressing a worthy […]
I made my debut on RTE’s excellent World Report on Sunday, June 3. My contribution, about the Yes Scotland launch in Edinburgh and the campaign for independence, is the third piece in. Click here to listen to my World Report piece