‘Security is an amazing thing' – Why a nice job in the civil service has become the new cool
Donal Ryan, a celebrated author who's been twice nominated for the Booker Prize, was effusive in his praise of working in the civil service in an interview with The Brendan O'Connor Show on RTÉ Radio 1 last weekend.
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RTÉ News
8 hours ago
- RTÉ News
The Prompt - imagining 'A World Without' with Sinéad Moriarty
This week on The Prompt on RTÉ Radio 1, guest writer Sinéad Moriarty's writing prompt is 'A World Without'. Sinead chose three pieces blind from the shortlist: C B Dunne - Looking At You Like You Were Unbreakable D Black- Ground G Faller - Birdsong J Godsil - A World Without Me Is Now Impossible T Mixon- A Pile Of Hurt A Pembroke - The Fractured Nest S Schlecht - Seed On Fertile Ground The first of the pieces selected for broadcast is by Jillian Godsil from Arklow Writers Group – her piece is a crafty take on the prompt imagining how it is now almost impossible to be forgotten with AI and digital tools to preserve us. "I used to imagine the world without me as something noble," she says. "A quiet vanishing. A gentle fade into the background hum of memory and mismatched stories. The kind of disappearance people toasted with bittersweet wine and said things like "They were one of the good ones"..." Jillian imagines "A world where "gone" is negotiable. Where you don't die, you just get archived. Where your kids don't light candles, they just ping your avatar and say, "Mum, quick one, how do I cook a ham?"" Sinéad Moriarty and The Prompt's presenter Zoë Comyns discuss the pros and cons of persisting as digital versions of ourselves. With a completely different approach to the prompt, Sebastian Schlecht imagines a being who accompanies and almost haunts the narrator from within: 'There is a little man. He lives in my heart. His favourite pastime is playing the drums. He likes to play in the middle of the night - once I fall asleep, when all is calm inside of me. Only when nothing but my blood is humming quietly does he start his act.' Sinead felt this piece handled that feeling of when 'you're in the grip of whatever worries you have and you can't think straight'. Schlecht said he 'woke up one night with my heart racing — almost like a mild panic attack. At first, my thoughts went into panic mode, but I was able to calm myself quickly. It wasn't a new feeling to me. I recognised it as a stress response rather than something dangerous — something happening in my body, not something that is me. "That sparked the image of a little person living inside my body. With the image of the little man came the thought that fear might not actually be mine. That it is sometimes inherited — a kind of generational fear, passed down from the people who came before me. That expanded the emotional world of the piece." Listen to last week's edition of The Prompt with guest writer Edel Coffey The final piece for this episode is written under the pen name Alice Pembroke. The author is a professional writer with several published books, currently parenting two small children while living in a nesting situation that inspired this work. She told The Prompt she would use a pen name due to legal sensitivities. "Family law proceedings in Ireland are subject to the in-camera rule," she says, "meaning that cases are heard behind closed doors to protect families' privacy. However, this also restricts discussion of matters like maintenance, access, and custody. Court-ordered reports, where assessors interview family members to recommend arrangements, are particularly sensitive. 'Nesting' (where children stay in the family home while parents move in and out) is often proposed but, due to the housing crisis, can leave separated parties stuck without secure accommodation." Alice's piece The Fractured Nest is a mix of fiction and memoir but outlines the complexities and psychological stress caused by this nesting arrangement. 'This is the court's solution. A "bird nest" arrangement. A home that stays steady, with parents drifting in and out like weather.' This piece moved Sinéad, who 'feels viscerally the story of love and loss, in the world that she now has to navigate.' 'Every week, I carry my life in the boot of my car—half a wardrobe, a laptop, charger, shampoo, and a book I am always too tired to read. On the other weeks, I disappear. I rent a room, small and scentless, with laminate floors and a humming radiator. I keep the blinds closed. I speak to no one. I wake up with the shape of them still pressed into my arms, their voices echoing in the crumple of the pillow. I wonder if they notice. The absence of my coat in the hall, the missing clutter of my tea mugs by the sink. Do they scan the house for me and find it flat, colourless?' "It transports you into another person's life," Sinéad says. "The power of this is that without having experienced it you feel every single bit of pain and loss that she's experiencing." Sinéad Moriaty's most recent novel Good Sisters is out now and her next book The In-Laws will be out in July, both published by Sandycove.
Extra.ie
21 hours ago
- Extra.ie
Inside Joanna Cooper and Conor Murray's love story as couple celebrate annniversary
It's been two wonderful years since Irish rugby star Conor Murray and Derry girl Joanna Cooper tied the knot. Joanna and Conor said 'I do' in Portugal, surrounded by their nearest and dearest, in June 2023 and have been living in the honeymoon stage ever since. Now, as they celebrate two years of marital bliss, let's take a walk down memory lane and look back on how things began for the loved-up couple. It's been two wonderful years since Irish rugby star Conor Murray and Derry girl Joanna Cooper tied the knot. Pic: Instagram/Joanna Cooper Joanna and Conor first met in 2018 on a night out in London. Although their chemistry was undeniable, Joanna has been open in past about how it was 'not love at first sight.' When asked by the Irish Independent if the pair were joined at the hip from day one, the former Miss Universe Ireland replied: 'I wouldn't say that.' However, it didn't take them long to make the first move, with the couple quickly embarking on a long-distance relationship, with Joanna modelling in London and Conor based back home for Munster training. Joanna and Conor said 'I do' in Portugal surrounded by their nearest and dearest in June 2023 and have been living in the honeymoon stage ever since. Pic: Instagram/ Joanna Cooper Despite the distance, their connection wasn't hindered in the slightest, with the pair moving in together quicker than expected. Speaking to host Ray D'Arcy on his RTÉ Radio 1, Conor explained: 'Joanna moved in fully at the start of lockdown which has been brilliant.' 'Thankfully we were planning it anyway, Joanna was due to move in at the end of the Six Nations back in March, it was happening anyway,' he added at the time. Now, as they celebrate two years of marital bliss, lets take a walk down memory lane and look back on how things began for the loved up couple. Pic: Instagram After marking their fourth anniversary, Conor decided to get down on one knee and make things official with the love of his life. The rugby star popped the question to Joanna in a romantic Dubai proposal in 2022. Wasting no time whatsoever, Joanna and Conor said 'I do' in Portugal, surrounded by their nearest and dearest in June 2023. Eager to grow their family further, Joanna and Conor announced that they were expecting their first child in May 2024, having welcomed a baby boy named Alfie on October 22. Pic: Instagram/Joanna Cooper Ahead of their monumental destination wedding, the couple also tied the knot in private in Ireland, with their dog Kevin being the guest of honour. Eager to grow their family further, Joanna and Conor announced that they were expecting their first child in May 2024, having welcomed a baby boy named Alfie on October 22. Joanna, Conor, and their little boy are now enjoying life post-international rugby as Conor announced his retirement earlier this year. Conor, Peter O'Mahony and Cian Healy all announced they'd be stepping back from the Ireland team in February after playing their final Six Nations games. We're excited to see what the future holds for this adorable pair.
Irish Times
6 days ago
- Irish Times
Elaine Feeney on her new novel: ‘I was pushing a sort of Chekhov dinner party in the west of Ireland'
Fresh from submitting a batch of student grades, the novelist and poet Elaine Feeney bursts into the Oyster Bar accessorised with a Penguin-branded tote from her 'lovely publishers' and the exuberance of someone who thought she might be late thanks to a train delay but isn't. We're not in the Hardiman Hotel on Eyre Square in Galway for oysters or cocktails, yet it feels like a celebratory occasion: the publicity push for Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, Feeney's third novel, is officially under way. 'You're my first interview,' she says, though she has only just reached 'the very end' of talking about her Booker Prize-longlisted second novel, How to Build a Boat , and is 'finally comfortable' with her understanding of it. She would like to have 'a nice coherent linear narrative' for me about the kernels that led to Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way – the title of which comes from Sophocles' Elektra – but she's never been one for straightforward hooks. READ MORE 'It would be good if I could just package this for marketing, but actually, no, it was a very sporadic, cacophonous journey, this book.' It started with a couple, Claire and Tom, and at first she thought it might be a love story, but realised it couldn't just be that. 'People come from long deep histories that they bring into their relationship, and it affects it. There's no such thing as a love story that doesn't have these layers of the past.' In the novel, Claire has moved from London back to her childhood home in Athenry to care for her dying father, only for English ex-boyfriend Tom to relocate nearby. As she wrote it, Feeney found herself sidelining 'poor Tom' to examine Claire's relationship with everyone from a ' tradwife ' influencer to her two brothers. 'This is my first Irish family saga,' she says. 'I have four siblings and, because we grew up in the countryside, they were my best friends. They might not think that, but they were. You're so close and it's a small space and I just loved them. And there's very little done about the transition from your family-of-origin to your partner and your own children and how much you can miss your siblings, weirdly.' But 'family saga' risks oversimplifying the novel, which, although mostly set in 2022, also slips back to Claire's childhood and the lives of her ancestors in Athenry during the War of Independence. Feeney had to concentrate hard on the final edits, because despite studying history and teaching it for many years, she's not good with time. 'I can't fathom it at all in my head. I have a very sort of shadowy idea of what time means.' She likes having 'muddy little avenues' in her novels, though what is clear is that Claire is 'at a bit of a loss', being back in a place that should be familiar to her yet somehow isn't. 'I don't know if you have ever experienced that. You're in a space that is intensely familiar and suddenly you start to look at it and you see other things, and it's not the shape you thought it was.' She knows not everyone has to 'constantly walk the same paths' they walked as a child, but she does this, having bought the Athenry house she grew up in. She lives there now with husband Ray Glasheen, a designer, and sons Jack (23) and Finn (17). Did that feed into this novel? 'It feeds into everything. It feeds into absolutely everything,' she says instantly. Claire is 'unsure what world she is meant to inhabit' – a confusion that comes to a deliciously dramatic head when Tom, unaware of the delicate alchemy of mixing friends, panics her by inviting her neighbours to a dinner intended for her university colleagues. 'All the worlds collide at the end. I was pushing a sort of Chekhov dinner party in the west of Ireland,' she says, laughing. 'I come out in a rash thinking about that, seriously.' [ Elaine Feeney: 'I was shocked at what boys were expected to do from a young age' Opens in new window ] The book explores the political dimensions of the domestic space – the power and value of which so often go unrecognised, she says – with Claire becoming obsessed with a Texan trad wife. Feeney researched this in a 'very Gen X' way: by watching TikTok videos through Instagram. 'I got really good recipes for cakes and stuff, and I'm a really bad baker. It may have pleased my husband momentarily. I didn't tell him for a little while, and he thought I was very pleasant for a week or so. He thought I was in really good form. Then I said, 'I'm doing a deep dive on tradwives,' and we laughed so much about it.' She doesn't have a big take on the 'movement', thinking it 'has to be about choice', but worries this is also 'the hackneyed response' to a phenomenon that is both 'another fiction on your screen' and a business that possibly gives the women some agency and economic reward. 'What it taught me is that people do dabble in this. But I think it's absolutely mind-blowing the idea of scrolling past tradwives, lemon tarts, meringues, unpasteurised milk, 'cottagecore'; on to war, on to dismembered bodies, then on to fertility sticks, or whatever. I get a lot of those ads. The brainf**kery – sorry – that it must be causing,' she says. The juxtaposition of banality and brutality, she notes, is also a facet of her novel. We talk about how hard it is to be shocked now, and I mention the sense of powerlessness that can result from online doomscrolls. 'Powerlessness! Powerlessness is something I would feel acutely, and I think a lot of people feel it,' she says. 'I feel powerless, but as a writer I also feel a certain creative weight of responsibility as well.' That responsibility includes interrogating Irishness and the complications of identity. 'Sorry to keep doing the sociological sort of stuff, but I am really interested in the cultural export that is Irish people now.' She fears countries are being branded as if they are material things. 'But who gets to brand them? I'm very proud of my Irish heritage, but I often wonder what that means, when I really interrogate it. It's complex, because of Ireland's treatment of women in particular, and also now with direct provision and the housing crisis, and I'm not just naming things. These are things that I would really consider.' Every human feels pressure to perform, and not just to perform their national identity, she thinks. She wouldn't like to enter a space with her 'whole unbridled self'. Still, she does tend to say what she wants to say most of the time. 'Sometimes I really wish I didn't, that I had some sort of polish.' [ Elaine Feeney: 'I write what I know, so the west of Ireland aesthetic permeates everything' Opens in new window ] Feeney is warm and engaging. Over the course of our two-hour chat, we touch upon alleged cures for shingles, the 1995 divorce referendum, terrible audio-transcription apps, the disappointing third season of The White Lotus, whether a magpie might hang out with a blackbird, both being born in the summer of 1979, our mutual love for Chris O'Donnell in the 1995 adaptation of Maeve Binchy's A Circle of Friends, and the 'fantastic' classroom scenes in Another Round. The reference to this Oscar-winning, teacher-centric Danish film in Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is one of its 'Easter eggs', or clues to her own life: Feeney taught English and history at St Jarlath's College in Tuam for 20 years. She loved teaching and the 'incredible people' she worked with, she says, but she didn't love the hierarchical structure and religiosity of the diocesan educational system, and it was this that crystallised her decision to leave. After the Tuam mother-and-baby home scandal broke, she felt acutely that she was 'on the wrong side of history', though she also wrestled with concern she might be 'giving up' on the boys she taught. 'It did come down to an ethical question for me in the end.' She is now involved in both the Tuam Oral History Project and writing charity Fighting Words, while lecturing full-time on the University of Galway's undergrad creative writing and postgrad writing degrees. 'They're all such brilliant writers, and I want them all to have publishing deals,' she says of her students. Lately, she has seen 'big interest' in gaming narratives, political poetry and fantasy/romantasy stories that demand world-building of the kind she says she can't do. Why would I risk everything by committing my love to paper? But anyway, I wrote a love poem Feeney, who began her literary career as a poet, always had a strong imagination – 'as a child I was a bit, you know, out there' – though it was her 2014 hospitalisation with life-threatening sepsis that proved the catalyst for her first novel. 'I was like, 'You nearly died, you better write a book, you wanted to write a book, you better do it.' So that – my own mortality – put fire in me.' Last year she published All the Good Things You Deserve, her first poetry collection in seven years. Its powerful, devastating title poem deals with a sexual assault that happened to her while she was in college. 'That was very personal, and I've done very little media about it. I just brought that softly, softly into the world,' she says. 'It took a long time to write the title poem, and to come to terms with putting any sort of narrative arc on the violence that I experienced as a younger woman. Of course, it was cathartic in some ways, but I really feel that art has to be more than a 'non-fiction of Elaine'. I wanted to tell that particular event in a way that I felt I was now controlling that story, finally, and it was no longer in control of me.' The collection ends with a love poem for her husband, though she had always told herself she was too cautious to write love poetry. 'Why would I risk everything by committing my love to paper? But anyway, I wrote a love poem.' When she alludes early in our conversation to a fourth novel in the works, I say I normally wait until the end to venture that question. So, she's already thinking about the next one? 'Of course I'm thinking about it. I wish I could just relax,' she says, but she doesn't sound too unhappy about being unable to, nor does she want to 'do the whole 'oh my god'' about being busy. 'Choices, my mother would say.' Mainly she feels relief that she got Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way down on paper and delight about everything from the joy of being served lemon and honey tea every day while recording its audiobook to the loveliness of being Booker-longlisted in 2023 alongside three other Irish authors. Sebastian Barry sent her a 'very generous' email, she says, when neither of them made the shortlist cut. 'I have nothing but gratitude now. That is genuinely how I feel about it. The journey has been mind-blowing for the last six or seven years. I haven't really stopped and taken stock of it, but once or twice I have, and I've just gone, 'Oh yeah, I'm really lucky.'' Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is published by Harvill Secker
