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…

So Buttoned Up — After two opening lines in ‘For Love of You’ by US poet Stephen Bett  By Emma Neale First time in my god damned life I forgot my name and when you said it, it went sherbet-wise inside the tiny wires of each…

School is how we train our kids for what to expect from life when they reach adulthood. We should be concerned, then, about what exactly we’re teaching them. Between helicopter parenting, jarringly early starts to the school day, overloaded…

Say what you will about George Lucas and the Star Wars movies he both directed and created, but the one thing that ran through all six of them was a sense of direction; a sense of story; a sense that what we were watching was taking us to a…

Depending on how you look at it, the release of the empathetic, sometimes exquisite bio-doc McQueen has come along at either just the right time or at the most inopportune moment. Most coming into the film will be aware that it’s…