An Irish Diary

An Irish Diary

One piece at a time – Fionnuala Ward on jigsaw puzzles

The crucial factors when choosing a jigsaw puzzle

For the record – Oliver O’Hanlon on Musical Marie and her piano marathons

She sustained herself with cereals, fruit juices, lettuce, eggs, cigarettes and two gallons of tea

Sex and table quizzes: Frank McNally on why being an anorak is cool again

Courtney Love, risqué art, and the Charge of the Light Brigade

Full of Grace – Frank McNally on Dublin’s latter-day love affair with Grace Gifford-Plunkett

Exhibitions shed light on a vivid personality

Éanna Brophy on a roundabout way of remembering

Roundabout names can point to a wealth of connections

Model citizen – Frank McNally on aviation pioneer Nancy Corrigan

From Mayo to Cleveland and beyond

What time do you call this? Alison Healy on punctuality

The Just Missed It Club

Keys to history – Ray Burke on the Qwerty keyboard

On the trail of the quick brown fox

Frank McNally on a Donegal disaster, the Irish Naval Service’s finest hour, and a great Russian-Irish translator

At a sombre gathering in west Donegal this week, locals marked the 80th anniversary of the Ballymanus sea-mine disaster

Bureaucratic Mess – Frank McNally on the old Civil Service Dining Club

Everything about the club was austere, especially the portions

Facing the music – Frank McNally on Beethoven’s Ninth, Behan in prison, and post-Covid smiling unmasked

Ode to Joy

Nordic Noir – Frank McNally on Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, past and present

The Scandinavian gloom deepened steadily for an hour and 40 minutes

A record-breaking sports broadcaster – Brian Maye on Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin

His Sunday night GAA results radio show acquired a worldwide audience

Alison Healy: What I learned from judging a bonny baby competition

If you ever become a judge on the bonny baby circuit, never wait around for feedback

Onward Christian Soldier’s Song – Frank McNally on a possible Protestant paternity for Amhrán na bhFiann

Anthem may have impeccably ecumenical credentials

Balladeer Diary – Frank McNally on the Behan-Kearney dynasty and Amhrán na bhFiann

The French connection

Hard Station – Frank McNally on a notorious but fictional Garda inspection from May 1923

As the decades passed, the murky context was lost

High Office – Frank McNally on Oscar Wilde’s professorial birthplace and other startling new developments in artificial intelligence

If walls could talk

Noisy nesters – Éanna Brophy on the ingenuity of magpies

These days you’ll see them flying about with branches of small trees in their beaks

Arthur Darley – Irish doctor who inspired a Beckett poem

The friend with the “gleaming eye”

It’s a steal – Alison Healy on hotels and pilferers

A little extra something from their stay

Centre stage – Brian Maye on actor, playwright and director James Bernard Fagan

He brought the works of Anton Chekov and Sean O’Casey to English audiences

From Home Ruler MP to anti-Treaty TD – Brian Maye on Laurence Ginnell

Westmeath public representative made his mark

PG rating – Éanna Brophy on Wodehouse in Wokeland

Trigger warning

A man of many parts – Brian Maye on actor and director Godfrey Quigley

Quigley's work with the Dublin Globe Theatre breathed fresh life into Irish drama

A tale of two Sams – both Uncle Sam and Sam Maguire have a bit of mystery attached to them

“Mayo for Sam!”

Royal Wee – Frank McNally on the great Northern diminutive, the Joys of Belfast, and Mo Mowlam’s Hand of History

A linguistic version of nanotechnology

In a Glass, Darkly – Frank McNally on looking into a “nanoedition” of Ulysses

An eye for detail

Routed Out – Frank McNally on the defensive road map of West Belfast

Even aside from its unfortunate acronym, the Belfast Urban Motorway (BUM) was a misguided dream

Writer’s Block – Frank McNally on the ugliest building in Belfast

Revisiting the old offices of The Irish Times

The rules of the street games – the era of offline fun

There were chasing games, hiding games, counting games and songs

Oscar Wilde’s false teeth were kept by a hotelier – but the family didn’t want them back

An Irishwoman’s diary: Oscar Wilde’s false teeth were kept by a hotelier who later tried to return them to the family – but they declined

Rhyming hope and Heaney: Frank McNally on political poetry, rubbing Princess Grace, and a brand of shoes named “Bertie”

An Irishman's Diary: Joe Biden gets some brownie points for pronunciation

Nothing but the trout: Frank McNally on the colourful origins of the legal principle res ipsa loquitur

An Irishman's Diary: Lending folkloric weight to the facts that speak for themselves

Mauling Molly: Frank McNally on the rampant sexual abuse of Dublin’s most famous statue

We may soon have to update the lyrics of the ballad: In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I first set my hands on…

Blithe Spirits: Frank McNally on an eccentric Dart passenger, a Martello Tower visit and the ghost of James Joyce

A story that has more holes in it than the storyteller’s T-shirt

Fionnuala Ward: I guess it’s time for elocution lessons to make a comeback?

Considering the demise of accents and related colloquialisms

Taking note – Brian Maye on pioneering traditional music scholar Donal O’Sullivan

A profound influence on Irish folk and traditional music

Great Ulster Friday - Frank McNally on Easter 1998, pre-Troubles sectarianism, and the great northern vegetable roll

Agreement memories

Portobello on Parade – Frank McNally on the phenomenon of Dublin suburb creep

At current rates of expansion, it will be in Stephen’s Green by Christmas

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