Yeats and the Arts Conference at NUIG Moore Institute

It was an honour to be part of this fantastic conference on "Yeats and the Arts", organised by Adrian Paterson and Thomas Walker at NUIG's Moore Institute at the weekend. It certainly was an erudite gathering! So while I was fairly intimidated delivering my paper on "Late WB Yeats's Late Bodily Visions" in front of such a pantheon of Yeatsians, it was so worth it to hear the wealth of insights, information, and, yes, footnotes from everyone else present! An extremely stimulating, thought-provoking, and enlightening weekend. I particularly loved all the visual art - there was loads of that, and publishing projects, in Yeats's milieu. Of course there was, with his father and brother being painters, and his sisters being wonderful craftswomen, and publishers. It was also nice to think again about scansion of verse, after not thinking about it for such a long time. Terrence Killeen was a particular beacon of verse scansion - the three sentences in Among School Children, for example. I could go on, and on and on and on, but I'll save it for another occasion. Massive thanks to the organisers, and the other participants.

Nice to take the plunge in the Clare Champion this week...

Interview with Sean Hillen

Yesterday, I interviewed photographer Sean Hillen about his eerie and insightful exhibition “Ghost Shops”. Photographing these tragic yet visually marvelous scenes of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland ‘through the looking glass’, made Hillen reminisce about the ‘famine evictions’ of yore, and wonder at how history can repeat itself.

Catch the final week of this poetic and somewhat disorienting exhibition before it ends at 5pm this Sunday! To get there, climb the stairs to the summit of “Base Camp”, on Middle Abbey Street (opposite Epicurean Food Hall, beside Arnotts), and behold the vertiginous view. (With sugar levels in mind, sweets & chocolate await you at the top). A hidden gem of an exhibition, in an exciting new space, we are sure you will agree. And thought-provoking too.

Taking the Plunge

Documentaries have been made drawing parallels between pilgrims bathing in the Ganges river in Varanasi, India, and swimming in Dublin’s Forty Foot. But I wouldn’t dare mention those pretentious theories to the down to earth swimmers of Byrnes’s Cove, Kilkee, County Clare. You know what you have to do but you just don’t talk about it. Jump in. Get moleculary rearranged. Say “lovely”.

Blue lips, purple skin with orange polka dots, goose-bumps… Baywatch, eat your heart out. These attractive hues and skin-textures may sound like the description of a corpse, but no, coupled with a triumphant smile, and the grab for a towel, you’ve got ‘the look’ of emerging from Byrnes’s Cove, swimming mecca.

To the uninitiated onlooker this practice may well appear like a strange native masochistic ritual, but for regulars, whose forefathers have been coming here for generations, this icy dip is heaven. No, really.

Until recently though, “Byrnes’s” (as it’s referred to in local parlance), was one of those men-only, ‘women out’ precincts, frequented by Earnest Hemingway types like my own father. That was, until people like sprightly aunties and their ilk started showing up, brazenly reclaiming one of the best bathing spots on our planet.

I myself was once confronted with a naked man on the slip-way. (I, of course, as a past pupil of Cahercon Salesian Secondary School was modestly attired). He stopped for a friendly chat. “My father swam here, my grand-father, and my great-grandfather before him”, he declared. “Really?” I responded, keeping my gaze above his (imaginary) belt. “So did mine”.

Then, in honour of the aforementioned ancestors, I tried to make as little of a song and dance about getting into the icy water as humanly possible. (It’s not unusual to get stuck with waves lapping at knee-level for a good five or maybe even ten minutes before mustering up the courage to take the plunge).

But, if you’re lucky enough to get caught in a sunbeam (sunbeams do happen), out there where sky and sea meet, drifting out into the middle of the bay, it can feel mystical. Then there is that psychedelic green of the seaweed. Just around the corner, I hear there is another swimming spot called ‘paradise’ which reveals itself only at certain rare confluences of tide, gravitational pull, and phase of moon. I haven’t found it yet, but it’s on my to-do list.


Life here revolves around tide tables. There’s a time for the Pollack Holes (the natural sea water pools across the bay, which emerge when the tide is out); a time for Byrnes’s (high tide); for Myles’s Creek; for the boards; for the strand. Days are spent chasing the tide around Kilkee’s perfect horseshoe bay from one swimming spot to another. Running into seldom-seen cousins from near and far-flung places on the prom, the conversation revolves around ‘how many swims have you had?’. There’s bravado, boasting, peer pressure, and, yes, competition.

The cold concrete, then the cold, wet stones underfoot. The ice bucket that is the chilly Atlantic lapping around your ankles, then your knees, then slowly, bit by bit, the whole way up until you stop at your hips and wonder: ‘Me? In there? I don’t think so’. You feel the fear and do it anyway. Suddenly, you are back to the basics of who you are, humbled and invigorated by the mighty Atlantic.

Letter to Irish TImes, July 6th, 2011

I am very grateful to the Irish Times for kindly publishing this letter on July 6th. I have had a great response so far, and I am very excited to see what comes out of it, in this project of piecing together the jigsaw of Erina Brady's overlooked life and influence in Ireland. Watch this space! & please do get in touch if you have any information to contribute to this story.... Also if you have any fellowships, post-doc's, or basic money to fund this important project!

Ninette de Valois: Adventurous Traditionalist, at the Royal Ballet School

Anna Meadmore of the Royal Ballet speaks about Ninette de Valois by VULGO.ie



Thanks to a Travel and Training Award from the Arts Council, I was lucky enough to get to the Royal Ballet Conference "Ninette de Valois: Adventurous Traditionalist" on the first weekend in April, in Covent Garden and at White Lodge, in Richmond Park. It's actually mindblowing to consider that this institution was founded by an Irish woman. Ninette de Valois was proud to be Irish, as you'll hear if you listen to the soundcloud above, of an interview I did with Anna Meadmore of the Royal Ballet. The whole event really was quite a revelation, about this wonderful Irish artist, who is totally overlooked in the country of her birth (She was born Edris Stannus, in Blessington, County Wicklow; her first dance was an Irish jig). Listen to the chat I had with Anna Meadmore, head of Academic Studies at the Royal Ballet about Ninette de Valois, and her relationship to Ireland, above. More to follow!

Did you know, incidentally, that the tenth anniversary of Ninette de Valois' death fell on International Women's Day, March 8th - which makes it all the more poignant that she wasn't even mentioned at the International Women's Day Events in Dublin. Maybe next year?

VULGO.ie & Irish Blog Awards mentioned alongside Liz Taylor in Irish Times Saturday Review :-)