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  • Meeting the costs of college

    Students the world over have a dubious talent for working all summer in foreign climes and coming home rich with experience, but no money. Hence the manic rush to secure part-time work come the start of the college year. p

  • Coming for the craic, not for the match

    There is no bank in Lisdoonvarna, nor are there any ATM machines. The nearest watering hole for cash is eight miles away in the north Co Clare town of Ennistymon, but that does not stop the money flowing during the six-week long matchmaking festival that finishes this weekend. A large sign - "Live life to the power of Guinness" - dominates an entry road to the village, and festival-goers oblige, adding lagers, spirits and Red Bull to the cocktail. The healthinducing sulphur waters of the traditional spa village are lost in the melee. Even the non-alcoholic beer is well past its "best before" date. Drinking starts at 11 a.m. and continues to the early hours next day. Hotel manager Marcus White has put old carpets down on the new to protect them against the onslaught of liquids as elbows jostle, bodies squeeze past one another and pints teeter. p

  • Unbuttoning Atwood

    A novelist can't lie to readers, says Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. "You can mislead them, withhold information, even not tell the whole truth, but you can't lie." She could be speaking of her work in general, but is referring specifically to the densely layered narrative of her 10th novel, The Blind Assassin, which has just been published. p

  • In Celtic Tiger Ireland, it's every family, every child, for itself

    Numbness seems to be the general reaction to the violent deaths of a mother and her two sons, victims, apparently, of one man's rage. How does one even begin to comprehend the state of mind of Stephen Byrne as he drove his car off a pier in Wexford while his sons, Alan and Shane, drew their last breaths in panic, then drowned? p
THE HOT TOPIC IN CONGO

  • Home alone

    It's two years since Evangelos Valavanis had to flee for his life. When the rebel soldiers raided his remote trading post in eastern Congo, they even swiped the mattress from his bed. The 68-year-old Greek sped into the jungle on the only available transport: a borrowed bicycle. p
OTHER REVIEWSBack to TopREVIEWSBack to Top

  • Significant, serious and rare

    First it is necessary to give the lie to the notion that the National Theatre production of Frank McGuinness's adaptation of Ramon Maria del ValleInclan's trilogy is indecent or sexually titillating. It is a serious-minded and major dramatic achievement of significant moral stature, in which some incidents, many words and certain images will cause offence to some people. But rape is offensive (and nothing to do with sexuality, being all about criminal power) and a Roman Catholic Abbot praying to Satan is offensive, and the author and his adaptor and director fully intended to demonstrate these and other offences for what they are. Valle Inclan's cruelly satirical style simultaneously enlarged the offences to grotesqueries, which may be why some commentators have chosen to identify him as a harbinger of the theatre of the absurd. p
RITE AND REASONBack to Top

  • Magee buying into myth of redemptive violence

    The recent newspaper and radio interviews with Patrick Magee were rare events. Magee, convicted for his part in the bombing of the Grand Hotel at Brighton in 1984, was willing to consider some of the moral questions raised by the use of violence for political ends. p
CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONSBack to Top

  • Corrections And Clarifications

    An article on the Comptroller and Auditor General's Report in last Friday's editions said the Millennium Committee had paid a grant of £133,750 for the Liffey Boardwalk project "without any invoices or architects' certificates being submitted by the company building the structure, Mile Atha Cliath Teo". p
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