14 May 2026

In our Malice in Blunderland world, it’s no more ludicrous that a nasty little spiv like Farage could become PM of the UK than that a pig-ignorant grifter became president of the USA.

Picture of the Week

Alice Maher is good at shock and awe - I remember her lamda print, Collar, from years back: a necklace of bloody sheep’s hearts draped over her naked shoulders. And another collar, this time of sheep’s tongues in Cassandra’s Necklace. I bumped into her first back in Cork in the early Seventies where she was the girl-friend of a promising young actor acquaintance of mine. Her name (my mother’s maiden name) and her Tipperary origins were positive indicators for me. I remember her extremely long, dark hair and a certain attractive saltiness of opinion, but little else. Theatre and literature were on my agenda in those days and art was rarely mentioned. But fast forward forty years or more and she is now a major player in the Irish art scene with a retrospective at IMMA behind her (in Earlsfort Terrace in 2012) and now featuring at the Venice Bienalle no less. Her striking work, Les Filles d’Ouranos (The Daughters of Uranus), originally conceived 30 years ago, has been repurposed to striking effect Maher’s work usually has a feminist agenda at its core. Here we see the daughters of Uranus (the Greek god of the sky) who emerged from the white foam generated by his severed genitals, enjoying the more gentle, lapping waters of Venice. A message for the lads in there somewhere.

The Moronic Inferno

Let’s take a break and indulge in a little fantasy. Maybe that plane carrying Trump and his bunch of opportunistic, uber-geek buddies Musk, Cook etc.) to China will suffer a fatal crash - ideally, and poetically, from a software malfunction. But I’d settle from an erratic drone or missile.

But a word about our own deferential little state from a name new to me - Sinead O’Sullivan, currently on Substack and a recent contributor (May 13) to the Irish Times on what’s behind the fuel strikes. Here’s an extract from her 13 April Substack about these strikes:

“I suspect this one did though because it showed people something they feel every day and placed it next to something they keep being told.

They feel: the three-hour commute in traffic, the closed GP list, the €2,200 rent, the fourteen-month wait for an MRI, the buses that don’t come, the trains that don’t exist, the schools with no places, the pubs that close before midnight, the €12 sandwiches.

And they keep being told: Ireland is the second richest country in Europe with a €23 billion surplus, record employment, and even if you’re not happy with this, just shut up and put up.”

Read her 13 April Substack for the detailed account with a telling graph attached.

Musical Interlude

Misguided Angel - the Cowboy Junkies

I’ve seen the Cowboy Junkies a few times - most memorably at the National Concert Hall in 2022. Margo Timmins gloriously soulful voice is at the heart of it all. I could have selected any number of songs: Blue Moon or the super plangent I’m So Lonesome I Can Cry.

A Morsel of Memoir

After leaving UCC with my “gentleman’s degree” as my military father described it (an Honours Degree in English and Philosophy), I dabbled in teaching for a while, tutoring at UCC and doing supply teacher work in a couple of VEC schools. However, it was a struggle, so I ran away to sea. I got a job as a roughneck on the Glomar North Sea – a converted and very unstable cargo ship drilling for gas off the Old Head of Kinsale. The Allihies-based artist Billy Griffin was a derrick-man on the same oil-rig at the time – much higher up the pecking order than me, and very much at home in that demanding environment. This deviation from the path of academic righteousness led to me spending nearly four years on the rigs, drilling also in the Atlantic 100 miles west of Shannon Airport, in the Sea Of Marmara in Turkey, off the Costa Blanca in Spain (the lights of Benidorm tantalisingly in view – all those Swedish girls, including the lovely Annika), and a halcyon six months in dry dock in Amsterdam (waking up at 6 am on the floor of a chill out room in the Milkweg). Hard physical times interspersed with fun and games. One night on the Atlantic, 100 miles west of Shannon airport, climbing the derrick (500 feet above the sea) with a grease gun attached to my shoulders in a gale-force wind, I decided to cut and run. I wanted a job where a paper-cut was the limit of possible physical harm. Back in Dublin I applied for a job in Altergo, an IT company that was looking for English teachers to prepare foreign students for the computer courses the company ran. I was less than qualified for this job but my interviewer was a woman who shared a number of acquaintances with me from my English department days in UCC, so I was in. This was a fortuitous time (1979) to get involved with the IT business and it led to 30 years of engagement with the industry – mostly with IBM and IONA Technologies. The latter company hired me to manage what became a large (35 staff) group of technical writers, graphic designers and web designers. IONA was a young company with a more liberal culture. You had access to senior management and could contribute directly to decision making – a major improvement after being cribbed, cabined and confined by IBM’s iron-clad processes. It was also much more fun. I got to go on stage with Canned Heat at one of our annual parties in San Francisco and we worked with the Bill Graham organisation there to stage a monster party featuring the original Spinal Tap group. IONA’s products were aimed at software engineers and this party was put on to bring our name to the attention of programmers in the USA. But where does the art come in to all this you might be asking yourself. Well, at the height of its success IONA moved into a smart new office block on Shelbourne Road (subsequently occupied by IBM). I approached our CEO Chris Horn and suggested that instead of festooning the place with product posters, we build up a contemporary art collection. I had the excellent AIB collection in mind as a model for corporate collections. To his eternal credit this austere Protestant gentleman liked the idea and presented me with a budget of €100,000 to bedeck the building with art. And so began my travels around the galleries and artists’ studios of Ireland - from Charlie Tyrrell in his Allihies eyrie to Colin Davidson is his fine Victorian house in Bangor, with twin Porsches parked outside. I enjoyed these adventures so much that when IONA eventually went under I forsook the rich spoils of IT employment for the genteel poverty enjoyed by those who write about art and the arts.

Poetry Corner

It must be time for another Philip Larkin poem. A horrible man: a racist (despite his passion for jazz), a snob, a little Englander, a misogynist surely with a sad, but hardly criminal penchant for spanking magazines. But the poetry can’t be faulted, the greatest since Auden amongst the Brits surely. Despite the efforts of some female critics to dismiss him from the canon. The best of him came out in his poetry - not in his laddish letters to Kingsley Amis. Read Going, Going or Aubade and be convinced. Here’s a lesser-known one with an Irish Flavour:

Dublinesque

By Philip Larkin

Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.

“Race-guides and rosaries” eh - that was us, and still is to an extent.