Seamus Heaney

When I was young, people didn’t really talk about sexual matters with their parents. The exactly three times my parents had sex in order to conceive m(...)

The habit certain people have of starting every sentence with the word “so” is now at least as old the century, I’m told. We should be well used to it(...)

This is the longest that Pauline Turley has been away from her New York workplace in a quarter of a century. The pandemic has theatre seats in the Iri(...)

It was a year in which one political entity was created, Northern Ireland, and another, the Irish Free State, was negotiated into being. It was also (...)

We won’t have any trouble remembering this year; in fact we’ll probably be reminiscing and boring much younger people about it for the rest of our liv(...)

A walking stick cut by Charles Stewart Parnell some 130 years ago is now used as a literary baton. For decades, it has been proudly passed from one ge(...)

My friend the writer Philip Casey once organised his archive for deposit at the National Library of Ireland. For years, he’d kept everything, a chrono(...)

It is tempting to wonder what Seamus Heaney would have made of the controversy over the use of his portrait to promote the centenary of Northern Irela(...)

“I’ve been avoiding calling you!” the old man goes. “Feared that you and I would get sucked into another one of our famous political contretemps vis-a(...)