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Fintan O'Toole

Fintan O'Toole

Literary Editor

Fintan O’Toole is literary editor of The Irish Times, and has been an op-ed columnist for the paper since 1988. His column on political and social affairs appears every Tuesday and Culture Shock, which is mostly about the arts, runs on Saturdays. He has written over a dozen books, most recently A History of Ireland in 100 Objects, based on his Irish Times series. Awards include the AT Cross Award for Supreme Contribution to Irish Journalism and TV3 Tonight Show’s Journalist of the Year in 2011.

Centre stage: Michael Colgan, director of the Gate, with Michael Gambon during the theatre’s 2010 production of Krapp’s Last Tape. Colgan believes that, for all the high-voltage celebrity of a minority of stars, actors in general are undervalued. Photograph: Matt Kavanagh/The Irish Times
Culture Shock: If acting were as easy as it should look, it wouldn’t be an art

The days when actors were widely seen as little different from pimps and whores are gone. But there is still an ambivalence about (...)

“Of course cycling should be encouraged and protected and made central to all plans for sustainable transport.” Photograph: Reuters
Cycling is a good thing, and boy do cyclists know it

Pedestrians need to be protected from abuses of the law and of common courtesy

Brilliant: The Green Fields of America
Culture Shock: No ‘Danny Boy’, no rebel songs, just great Irish music

Mick Moloney’s brilliant Green Fields of America has been a staging post, proving ground and launch pad for almost everything that(...)

Preschool education is a vital public good. There is an overwhelming public interest in the provision of high quality early education to all children, regardless of their family circumstances.
No longer citizens, just customers

Column: as the State is dismantled piece by piece, the idea that we are citizens of a republic is an awkward, business-unfriendly (...)

Mere detritus: in Timothy O’Sullivan’s photograph A Harvest of Death human beings are dumped across a careless, pitiless landscape. Photograph: Library of Congress
Culture Shock: The first photograph of the casual horror of war

Look at A Harvest of Death, on show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and you’ll begin to see why the young Irish-American Timoth(...)

Apple’s plant in Hollyhill, Cork. “An official White House report categorised Ireland as a tax haven in 2009 and last week’s Senate hearings on Apple’s creative accounting embedded the phrase in public discourse. If it takes permanent hold, the consequences could be enormous.” Photograph: Reuters/Michael MacSweeney
Ireland needs a better economic strategy than ‘come here to avoid tax’

Column: A country cannot bet its future on forever facilitating global corporations as they seek to deprive their home government(...)

Emigration story by far the most important of modern Ireland

Column: We may mark the bicentenary of the Famine knowing we are still living its demographic legacy

Commodified: the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s re-creation of the CBGB toilets for its show Punk: Chaos to Couture. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty
Punk goes down the pan at the Met

Culture Shock

Alex White and Minister for Health James Reilly. “In spite of soothing noises from Minister of State Alex White, the fact is that nothing has been done after two-and-a-half years.” Photographer: Dara Mac Donaill
Free GP care not a priority for austerity sadists

Column: It is much cheaper for the State to give people, especially those with chronic illnesses, free access to their GPs

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