There aren’t many mood pieces in Irish cinema. There are plenty of great stories and plots full of action, drama and suspense. Yet, while some of them capture a mood, it’s never the primary goal. Kissing Candice is different. Not good or…

In the Winter 2015 issue of the The Stinging Fly Billy Ramsell invited poets to write what Ramsell called souterrains- a kind of layer below, an archaeology of the poems that would feature in the issue. These souterrains were poems in…

It all starts when your close friend (who’s called you to dinner to talk about “something important”) says, “BTW, been seeing a therapist for the last two years, have PTSD, mainly because of a childhood sexual abuse incident, okay, cool,…

I’m an Ocean’s virgin. That’s probably one of the stranger sentences I’ve written but what I mean is that I’ve never seen any of the original Ocean’s trilogy. I’m not a fan of heist movies because it’s rare that they allow for good…

Irish cinema has really blossomed in the past few years. In the 90s and early 2000s, (outside of Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan’s work) one could synonymise the country’s output with adjectives like cheap, stuffy and slog. For whatever reason…

Katy Perry’s first foray into pseudonymous stardom, One Of The Boys, turns ten this week -- and to be honest, it hasn’t aged well. Perry, who has spoken at length about her strict Christian upbringing leads a musical commentary on what life…

Brendan Behan entered the world's stage on the 9th of February 1923. As the Irish Civil War was raging Behan was born in the heart of Dublin city to a family steeped in the Irish Republican tradition. Being born into a staunch family of…

I remember standing in Whelan’s on a hot August evening in 2014. Irish synth-metal outfit No Spill Blood had just performed leaving my sensitive eardrums ready for whatever punishing assault the Californian black metal, shoegaze outfit…