Fighting Farney – Frank McNally on the battle for his hometown’s ‘western front’Carrickmacross's lopsided pub distribution seems to be indirect effect of a deeper divisionWed Dec 10 2025 - 19:00
Monumental misstep: Frank McNally on the ‘tragedy’ of a great Irish sculptor, John HughesWhat should have been the peak of the sculptor’s career was doomed to coincide with what the Chinese call interesting timesTue Dec 09 2025 - 19:00
Frank McNally: Investigating the mystery of the black stork’s Irish rootsThis beautiful and shy bird is a rare visitor now, but that may not always have been the caseFri Dec 05 2025 - 19:00
Bognor Bodies – Frank McNally on the Irish literary connections of an English seaside townIts English origins stem from a holiday James Joyce and his family spent there in the summer of 1923Thu Dec 04 2025 - 19:00
‘The cadet was now descending rapidly towards Cavan without any training in the use of a parachute’The lesson for the day in question was how to deal with an aircraft when it stalled and went into a spinTue Dec 02 2025 - 19:00
Bitter Harvest – Frank McNally on the darker side of farming in Flanders and the SommeBody parts are still being found, exhumed, and if possible identifiedFri Nov 28 2025 - 19:00
Fields of Gold – Frank McNally on the rise and fall of a colourful Monaghan familyTheirs was an old English surname, derived from proximity to cornfields or work as a harvesterThu Nov 27 2025 - 19:00
A stranger in a pub in Spain hugged me like we were old friends after Parrott’s heroicsIn the ensuing mayhem, a man I’d never met before hugged me like we were old friendsTue Nov 25 2025 - 19:00
Ring of untruth – Frank McNally on how the Irish language gave ‘phoney’ to EnglishA link with telephones was also suspectedFri Nov 14 2025 - 19:00
Rock of Ages – Frank McNally on the shock of punk turning 50Sid Vicious had been included in the Sex Pistols mainly for his comic-scary appearanceThu Nov 13 2025 - 19:00
Adolf Mahr: Frank McNally on the confused reputation of an Austrian Nazi in 1930s IrelandWhen he tried to resume his old job in Dublin after the war, he was no longer welcomeWed Nov 12 2025 - 19:00
Thwarted hotel development keeps doors closed at Dublin pub 121 years after Leopold Bloom ‘pushed in the door of the Burton’, public house doesn’t know where it standsTue Nov 11 2025 - 19:00
Flying columnist – Frank McNally on a lightning visit to LeesideHe studied me a second, as if trying to assess if I was a Dublin jackeen out to make a feck of himFri Nov 07 2025 - 18:59
The Death of Reilly - Frank McNally on the demise of ‘Reilly, Ace of Spies’ 100 years agoRussian-born intelligence agent who called himself Sidney Reilly, and inspired James Bond, made use of several Irish cover identitiesThu Nov 06 2025 - 19:00
Daily Telegraph’s agony aunt faces a conundrum – a mother worried that her son is turning ‘Irish’We are well used in this country to visitors outdoing us in the performative aspects of IrishnessWed Nov 05 2025 - 19:00
‘This is a godforsaken place’: A despairing letter from a garda stationed in Tipperary in 1940Written in the outpost of Rearcross, the letter is a bleak portrait of human misery worthy of Samuel Beckett Tue Nov 04 2025 - 19:00
Camera Obscura: An exhibition of ‘secret’ photography at Kilmainham GaolThe Prisoners’ Lens shows theatrical staged scenes which remind us that the events of 1916 were inspired by playwrights and actors as well as poetsSat Nov 01 2025 - 06:00
How Nancy Spain became the unlikely heroine of an Irish folk classicChristy Moore’s haunting song immortalised the woman Nancy SpainWed Oct 29 2025 - 19:00
What’s another year? Frank McNally on the rise of a new tautologyWords that were doing a perfectly good job are suddenly deemed to need prefixes Tue Oct 28 2025 - 19:00
Laughing for Ireland? Frank McNally on Bobby Sands and KneecapSands would surely have approved of the rap band’s success in helping make Irish fashionable with the youngFri Oct 24 2025 - 19:00
Faithful departure: Frank McNally on a belated first visit to Knock Airport, 40 years on I had to marvel briefly at its location, on a hilltop bog halfway between Charlestown and nowhereThu Oct 23 2025 - 19:00
A rock in a hard place: Frank McNally hunts an elusive ancient monument in MayoNatural monolith covered with carvings suggests Croagh Patrick was an object of pilgrimage long before ChristianityTue Oct 21 2025 - 19:00
Frank McNally: A History of Ireland in a Hundred HyperbolesA catalogue of 100 colourful expressions, myths, legends and sayingsMon Oct 20 2025 - 19:00
Old Men of the Canal – Frank McNally on the herons of Percy PlaceThere is something military-looking about the birds’ appearanceFri Oct 17 2025 - 19:00
Roots and Branch: Alex Haley’s lesser known Irish heritageThe Roots author’s follow-up novel Queen traces five generations of a second branch of his ancestry back to a town in Co MonaghanFri Oct 17 2025 - 06:00
A Feast of Festy: A new lease of life for a colourful Irish nameFestus, from the Latin for ‘joyful’, is a popular boy’s name in NigeriaWed Oct 15 2025 - 19:00
Lips Sealed - Frank McNally on a mysterious facial feature, the philtrumNow it’s just a vestige of evolution, with no apparent function.Fri Oct 10 2025 - 19:00
Cast a Cold Eye – Frank McNally on the monuments, republican and otherwise, of TipperaryDivorced of importance it later acquired, was original War of Independence event worthy of pride?Thu Oct 09 2025 - 19:00
Our Man in Havana – Frank McNally on a forgotten Irishman honoured in CubaJames Joseph O’Kelly was also, for a brief period, a man of two wivesWed Oct 08 2025 - 19:00
Charlie Tango – Frank McNally on revisiting the Charlie Hebdo massacre 10 years onIn keeping with a low-budget production, the movie was projected onto a make-shift screenTue Oct 07 2025 - 19:00
Martin Mansergh risked career to progress peace process in early stages, funeral hears‘Unambiguously republican’ politician understood unionist tradition, mourners in Tipperary hearMon Oct 06 2025 - 19:34
Immaculate reception: How an Irish priest helped turn the Pittsburgh Steelers into winnersFrank McNally: Relationship between Fr John J Duggan and team’s original owner was founded on a misunderstandingFri Oct 03 2025 - 19:00
Howya Heid? - Frank McNally on a visit to one of Glasgow’s toughest pubsWe had only dropped in for the proverbial one drinkThu Oct 02 2025 - 19:00
Waking Dream – Frank McNally on having intimations of mortality at a book launchThere may even have been ghosts present, as I was reminded by the attendance of some of my maternal cousinsTue Sept 30 2025 - 19:00
Frank McNally: My life as a civil servant in 1980s DublinFrank McNally on the Department of Social Welfare in Not Making Hay – The Life and Deadlines of a ‘Diary’ FarmerSat Sept 27 2025 - 06:00
Here it was again, the phantom Yeats quote in an Irish pub in PerpignanThis same legend turned up on the Dublin City Marathon medal two years agoSun Sept 14 2025 - 19:00
Skipping pages – Frank McNally on trawling through the discarded library of a lifetime A full-blown bibliophile, the deceased was said to have had up to 100,000 volumesFri Sept 12 2025 - 19:00
For the Birds – Frank McNally on an encounter with Dublin’s Pigeon ManWhen I got a word in edgeways, finally, I wondered why Dublin’s rapacious seagulls never came near himWed Sept 10 2025 - 19:00
Blades and Fades – Frank McNally on New York’s ‘Lads of Kilkenny’ and a Joycean Fenian in ParisWashington Irving was a native New Yorker who had no known connection with KilkennyTue Sept 09 2025 - 19:00
The Word made fresh: One enlightening billboard outside a church in Mount MerrionA friend from south Dublin suggested I write something about a church billboard where Foster Avenue meets the Stillorgan dual carriagewayFri Sept 05 2025 - 19:00
Tourists beware: supposed new ‘traditions’ at Dublin statues As with tour guides inventing stories, here’s hoping the phenomenon is not on the riseWed Sept 03 2025 - 19:00
A day trip to Electric Picnic does not go as plannedIf you go down to the woods: Frank McNally on a long, dark night of no soul in StradballyTue Sept 02 2025 - 19:00
Eavesdropping on tour guides in Dublin I overheard what sounded like a very dubious story I began to feel some Swiftian indignation on the part of the innocent Americans who were listening to the tour guide’s claimSat Aug 30 2025 - 06:00
Contraceptive crop: How an Irish-American agricultural fortune helped pay for the pillPhilanthropist Katharine McCormick used her riches to help the cause of women’s rights Thu Aug 28 2025 - 19:00
Dedicated to the one I hate: Frank McNally on how a book inscription came back to haunt Patrick KavanaghSigned first American edition of Tarry Flynn is dedicated to ‘poet and painter’ Brendan BehanTue Aug 26 2025 - 19:00
The night a ‘sputnik’ crash-landed in rural WexfordA garda arrived immediately to cordon off a crater in the field, then the Army was called inFri Aug 22 2025 - 19:00
‘A breakthrough in the case of my stolen Dublin Bike and the subsequent €150 fine’ I am no wiser as to where the bicycle spent its long, lost weekendThu Aug 21 2025 - 19:00
A daisy with a doctorate? Frank McNally on the enrolment of ragwort in a rewilded TrinityWho knows how ragwort will evolve with the benefit of a few years in university? It might lose the latter part of its name, Jacobaea vulgaris, for a startThu Aug 21 2025 - 06:00
Ballet Go Backwards – Frank McNally on Patrick Kavanagh’s short-lived career as a dance librettistThis strange incident came about because of another surprising phenomenon little remembered todayTue Aug 19 2025 - 19:00
The Irish caminos: Climbing the ‘passage of the birds’ - a Connemara rival to Croagh PatrickFrank McNally on an ancient Connemara pilgrimage, once suppressed by the church but now happily revivedSun Aug 17 2025 - 06:00
