Robert De Niro calls for protest against 'philistine' Trump
Hollywood icon Robert De Niro lambasted 'philistine' US President Donald Trump and his proposed movie tariff at the Cannes Film Festival's opening ceremony.
Released Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander was reunited with family members after 19 months of captivity by Hamas. Video: Reuters
Dubliner Oscar Despard captained a team from Christ's College, Cambridge to victory in the final of the BBC student quizshow University Challenge. Video: BBC
The Irish Times chess columnist Jim 'JJ' Walsh (93) has retired. He has written about chess in the newspaper for close to 70 years. Video: Dan Dennison
The front facade of an unoccupied cottage in Ranelagh has crumbled and fallen onto the street, obstructing a footpath. Video: Dara MacDonaill
Donegal managed to get players underlapping back the pitch in order to retain possession at the end of extra-time as Armagh aggressively hunted them
Two otters fight in the river Lee. Video: Chris Moody
Jas Fagan Tailor shop on Dublin's Thomas St has been making Holy Communion suits for many years. Jas's son Leonard now runs the business. Video: Bryan O'Brien
Patsy McGarry takes a closer look around the meaning of Robert Frances Prevost's choice of his papal name: Leo XIV.
Journalist and historian Ronan McGreevy tells the story of how The Irish Times's most famous front page was created. Video: Dan Dennison
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Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
CMAT: ‘Ireland is a really hard place to live unless you have money, which we didn't'
Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, or CMAT as she's professionally known, says she can clearly remember writing the song that changed her life. She was 22 and having moved from Ireland to Manchester, was working in TK Maxx and, at the weekends, as what she's fond of calling a 'sexy shots girl': 'Cash in hand, £8 an hour, 11pm to 3am, teetering up and down the stairs of a nightclub in the building where Joy Division shot the video for Love Will Tear Us Apart with a tray of Jägermeister shots they'd put a bit of dry ice in – burned your skin if you got it on your hands – selling them for £3 each. Terrible job. And just getting absolutely stoned out of my bin all the time, doing whatever drugs anyone would give me for free. I had absolutely no friends.' An attempt to get her musical career off the ground, 'trying to make hyperpop because I loved Charli XCX so much', had come to nothing. She had just broken up with her 'old, weird' boyfriend and was 'completely alone in a flat in Chorlton, thinking: 'What have I done?' I got really, really, really upset. I kind of looked at myself in the mirror ...' She lets out a snort of laughter. 'I feel like there's so many film scenes where people write songs and I'm like, 'that didn't f**king happen like that', but this one did. So I'm crying, grabbed my guitar and wrote I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! in like 20 minutes. And that was that. I thought: 'I know what I need to do now.'' A couple of years later, I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! was one of a trio of smart, witty, country-inflected songs that catapulted Thompson to lockdown-era fame in her native Ireland, turning her into what she calls 'a big fat pop star' in a matter of months. Her debut album, If My Wife New I'd Be Dead , entered the Irish charts at No 1, its success spreading to the UK, Europe, Australia and the US. Her second, Crazymad, for Me , featured a duet with John Grant and was nominated for an Ivor Novello award and the Mercury prize . Success all happened 'purely because I've got better at writing songs', and came surprisingly easily, she says. 'Whenever someone's like, 'Oh, is it really difficult?' There's parts of it that are difficult, but in general, I'm just like 'This is class, no issue at all. This is great.'' CMAT on Later with Jools Holland. Photograph:BBC Studios / Michael Leckie There's no doubt that CMAT is a fantastic pop star, and you can see why Sam Fender has her opening for him in a series of stadiums. Arriving at her record company offices direct from a photo shoot, she looks extraordinary. Her clothes are a riot of bright clashing colours, her enormous sunglasses initially hide eyes thick with glittering blue make-up: she manages to exude a certain chaotic glamour while eating a pasty as a late lunch. READ MORE She is incredibly forthright on a huge range of topics. She stands up for trans rights – 'If you think of social media as like a video game, you rack up the spoils really high when you decide to go for a group of people who are already at risk' – and confronts the culture of wellness and self-improvement or, as she calls it, 'the rise-and-grind ethic which is making people insane and making them unable to communicate with other people because they're so obsessed with focusing on themselves'. Sometimes she's too forthright for her mum, though: a recent appearance on Adam Buxton's podcast provoked a dressing down. 'She told me it made her cringe: 'That lovely posh Englishman, so well spoken, and you calling yourself a c**t the whole interview. And you're not a c**t, you're lovely.'' And yet, she concedes there has been a significant downside to her breakthrough. 'The kind of head space that good songs come from is one of extreme emotion, extreme depth of feeling,' she says, 'which has an impact on my life. I do live in that really heightened state of emotion all the time. I'm crazy and I do crazy things, and I have crazy relationships with people.' She doesn't mean crazy as in wild or outrageous, she qualifies. She means crazy as in authentically unwell, or – as she puts it with characteristic bluntness – 'mental'. Now 29, Thompson, thinks she has always suffered from auditory hallucinations, but during the making of her third album, 'I started actually hallucinating. I was in New York, writing. I didn't realise for the first two months that was what was happening, but I basically imagined the entire apartment I was staying in was crawling with insects, that I had insects crawling on my skin all the time. I was calling the landlord, letting off bug bombs, I made them throw the couch out because I thought it was covered in fleas. I was itching all the time. I was texting a group chat of friends, sending them pictures of all the bug bites on me: New York's disgusting, full of insects. And they didn't exist. I went to the doctor and showed him my bites and he said: 'Those are stress hives; you're mental.'' (Possibly not an exact diagnosis.) 'I was hallucinating the whole time.' For that reason, she worries that songwriting might not be a sustainable occupation for that reason, or that taking medication might cause the flow of songs to stop. But whatever the pains staked in writing its contents, her new album is superb. It pushes at the boundaries of her previous work's sound: into synth-heavy territory on the title track, pop soul on Running/Planning and distorted alt-rock on The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, a song during which the constant sight of the TV chef's face in Britain's motorway services seems to bring about an existential collapse in the mid-tour CMAT. CMAT on stage at Fairview Park ,Dublin, last year. Photograph: Tom Honan It arrives in a sleeve featuring its title, Euro-Country, written in the kind of script beloved of Irish-themed pubs, above an exceptionally striking photo based on Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1896 painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well. It features Thompson emerging from a fountain in the middle of a shopping centre near her hometown of Dunboyne, Co Meath . She was born in Dublin . 'Blanchardstown shopping centre,' she says. 'For the first 10, 11 years of my life, it was like my local village. My sister, who lives in Blanch now, goes to the shopping centre every day. You drive there if you want to see other people and then you drive back home again and live in your house by yourself.' That's the reality of much of Irish life, she says. 'There's a kind of space that Ireland is occupying in western media culture right now, a little more fetishised and trendy than it's ever been. Americans think it's cute; English people are like, 'Ooh, I love Guinness and Kneecap and The Banshees of Inisherin , and I'm getting my Irish passport and mmm, I love potato farl.' People talking about Hozier like he's a magical, delicate fairy from the bog. It's a romanticised version of Ireland that doesn't exist. It's a really hard place to live, a really hard place to grow up, unless you have money, which we didn't. So yeah, magical, beautiful, mystical Ireland: it's a shopping centre, that's what I grew up with. A shopping centre.' I'm aware of the fact that my career is going to struggle as a result of this stuff, but I also think everyone else in music needs a kick up the hole Ireland's recent history suffuses Euro-Country, which features vocals in Irish, songs called Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy and Tree Six Foive and a title track that she describes as 'a collage, a mood board' about the financial crisis that engulfed the country in 2008. 'I was about 12 and it all happened around me, it didn't really happen to my family directly,' she says. 'My dad had a job in computers, we didn't really have any money, we weren't affluent, but we were fine. Everybody else on the estate we lived in worked in construction, or in shops, and they all lost their jobs. Everybody became unemployed. Then, in the village I grew up in, there was a year or 18 months where loads of the people I went to school with, their dads started killing themselves because they'd lost everything in the crash.' Initially, Thompson thought she must have misremembered this. 'But I dug deep, did research and the amount of male suicides that happened in Ireland at that time was astronomical. When I hit secondary school, teenage boys started killing themselves as well; that was very common where I grew up. I think it was a kind of chain reaction as a result of the economic downturn. I'm not blaming anyone – no one ever purposely tries to cause that much harm. It's trying to get all this stuff together and think: 'Why did all this happen and how do we stop it from happening again?' I don't have the answer but I think we all need to keep looking at it and really f**king try to hound ourselves into a position where we're not just thinking about monetary gain all the time.' Euro-Country is a noticeably more political album than its predecessors, which tended to focus on relationships and the chaos of her personal life. Thompson says she couldn't really see anyone else in her position doing it, so decided to take it on. 'No one is dealing with capitalism as a force for bad, this really f**king horrible putrefied version of capitalism which has absolutely had a line of coke up its f**king hole since Covid, where the richest people in the world are so much richer than they used to be five years ago,' she says. 'Pop stars won't come out and say that because they'll be absolutely shot for it, because they've all done brand deals: 'Oh, I love my Dove moisturiser.'' [ CMAT in Dublin: A night of real emotion in one of the best gigs of the year Opens in new window ] Thompson was one of a number of artists to pull out of Latitude and other festivals over sponsor Barclays providing financial services to defence companies supplying Israel . She says that as soon as she removed herself from the line-up, an upcoming deal with a designer perfume brand disappeared. 'They ghosted me. I lost a lot of money. But who f**king cares? I'm aware of the fact that my career is going to struggle as a result of this stuff, but I also think everyone else in music needs a kick up the hole. Where's all the f**king artists? Where's all the f**king hippies?' Of course, another reason why musicians might feel abashed about mentioning politics is fear of a social media backlash, something Thompson knows all about. Last year, an Instagram video of her performing at BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend festival attracted so much abuse – largely directed at her weight – that the BBC was forced to disable comments. She laughed it off at the time, suggesting she should be imprisoned for the crime of 'having a big fat ass', but returns to the subject on her current single, Take a Sexy Picture of Me (it has turned into that rarest of things: a song about body shaming that has provoked a TikTok dance trend, with it-girl Julia Fox and Chicken Shop Date host Amelia Dimoldenberg participating). 'Prior to moving over to the UK I would never have thought I was plus size,' she says. 'And then I started working with fashion directors in London for photoshoots and started hearing: 'Wow, you're so lucky I collect plus-size Mugler because no one else will be able to dress you.' I thought: what are you talking about? I'm a size 14! I thought everyone was this size! Why are you being so weird? But truth be told, if someone on the internet calls me a big fat ugly bitch, I'm like 'yeah, whatever', I don't f**king care. But I started realising that other people were witnessing it and other girls, young girls, were witnessing this happening to me on a f**king huge scale – what must they think of that? How is it going to make them feel, particularly if they're bigger than me?' She brings it back to commerce. 'In day-to-day real life, if you think being fat will stop people from ever wanting to have sex with you, let me tell you that is not the case in such an extreme way. I've seen the girlies out there doing unbelievably well for themselves, right? But [because] fatness is not commercially viable, it's not in the realm of commercial attractiveness.' Online, she says, the body image discourse brings out 'weak-willed, spineless people who have been brutalised by commercial viability, criticising someone for not falling within the realms of what is easily sellable'. [ CMAT on launching her second album: 'This has been the great joy of my life to be able to do this' Opens in new window ] Thompson says she is aware that the political bent of Euro-Country is a big ask of audiences in 2025, when pop seems to largely function as a means of temporary escape from a terrifying world. 'It can be read as incredibly cringe and incredibly earnest and on the nose, right? It's an embarrassing thing for me to be asking of people. Because it's not trendy to be earnest any more. I'm aware of that, and ...' She laughs again. 'Actually I don't care. I don't care if I'm putting my foot in it, I don't care if I'm saying something wrong. We've all been too measured, too careful because we're being witnessed all the time. I think we need more willingness to fail. Even if it's futile, you've got to f**king try. Because it's f**king depressing otherwise.' – The Guardian Euro-Country is released via CMATBaby and Awal on August 29th
Irish Independent
8 hours ago
- Irish Independent
Kneecap and 80s legend Paul Weller share a cuppa in Dublin
The 'modfather' was pictured with two of the three band members at Phibsborough's Bang Bang Cafe on Thursday night. Móglaí Bap, DJ Próvaí and the band's manager Daniel Lambert were reportedly celebrating with Paul after their Irish language film nabbed the top prize at the Celtic Media Awards. Set in west Belfast, the film tells the story of how Mo Chara, DJ Próvaí and Móglaí Bap came together to 'change the sound of Irish music forever". The self-titled movie was awarded the Spirit of the Festival at the celebration of media throughout the Celtic nations and regions. Weller was one of 40 acts who signed an open letter opposing what they claim were efforts to censor the trio due to their political statements during performances. Sharing the snap to Instagram, Bang Bang cafe received numerous messages of support for the musicians, with one writing: 'As if we don't already love Weller enough'. 'Not one bit jealous! Paul Weller is just the greatest!,' added another. Rapper Mo Chara whose real name is Liam Óg ÓhAnnaidh, was handed a terrorism charge by UK police late last month. It follows allegations that a Hezbollah flag was displayed at one of the band's concerts at the O2 Forum in Kentish Town, London, last November. The 27-year-old is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London on June 18. ADVERTISEMENT In a statement posted on social media, Kneecap said: 'We deny this 'offence' and will vehemently defend ourselves.' Counter-terrorism police previously also investigated Kneecap after videos emerged allegedly showing the band calling for the deaths of MPs and shouting 'up Hamas, up Hezbollah'. The group apologised to the families of murdered MPs but said footage of the incident had been 'exploited and weaponised', and also said they have 'never supported' Hamas or Hezbollah, which are banned in the UK. In response to the charge, the group said in a social media statement: '14,000 babies are about to die of starvation in Gaza, with food sent by the world sitting on the other side of a wall, and once again the British establishment is focused on us. 'We deny this 'offence' and will vehemently defend ourselves, this is political policing, this is a carnival of distraction. 'We are not the story, genocide is, as they profit from genocide, they use an 'anti-terror law' against us for displaying a flag thrown on stage. A charge not serious enough to even warrant their crown court, instead a court that doesn't have a jury. What's the objective? 'To restrict our ability to travel. To prevent us speaking to young people across the world. To silence voices of compassion. To prosecute artists who dare speak out. 'Instead of defending innocent people, or the principles of international law they claim to uphold, the powerful in Britain have abetted slaughter and famine in Gaza, just as they did in Ireland for centuries. Then, like now, they claim justification. 'The IDF units they arm and fly spy plane missions for are the real terrorists, the whole world can see it.' The controversy has not stopped their rising popularity and they are set to play one of the biggest dates in their career to 12,500 fans at London's Wembley Arena next September 18. Kneecap were cancelled from the TRNSMT concert line-up in Glasgow, which they were due to play in July, due to safety concerns from UK police according to the festival. However, Glastonbury has confirmed band will not be cancelled from the festival and have put the group on a larger slot on the Saturday afternoon at West Holts Stage.
Irish Times
10 hours ago
- Irish Times
Timing of Hell for Leather ideal as viewers reminded why Gaelic football is GAA's code with furthest reach
Midway through the first episode of Hell for Leather, RTÉ's elegant five-part series on the history and nature of Gaelic football, we see a clip of a young boy at some kind of GAA family fun day. With his face painted like a lion, he embarks on a hectic solo run. He chips the ball over the head of the first defender and closes his eyes as he catches it on the bounce. Then tries a toe-to-hand that flies up above his head, but he keeps running, improvising as he goes, like jazz. The camera never loses sight of the boy's enraptured face and, in the slow-motion sequence, every movement he makes with the ball is uninhibited. His relationship with the game has yet to be polluted by systems and strategies and all the paraphernalia of risk management that, until recently, threatened to destroy Gaelic football. The clip is underlaid by interview footage from Juliet Murphy, the eight-time All-Ireland winner with Cork . 'With football, the skills are bunúsach ( basic),' she says, 'but they're beautiful in motion.' The opening episode focuses on football's roots. Bundled up with that are childhood memories and first feelings. Brian Fenton, one of the greatest players of the modern era, talks about knocking the pebble dash off the gable end of his family home in Dublin , in the simple act of kicking and catching. But then he talks about grown-up football trespassing on the innocence of that relationship. READ MORE 'Playing the game as a child, this is the game you love and this is all you know,' he said. 'As things got more serious – and at that elite level – you kind of lose sight of that beautiful game you played as a kid. In many ways, some of our best games were when you strip everything back and the team talk is just, 'this is the game you've played all your life. Just go out and play the game you love. Go out and play it as if you're a child again'.' A little later in the piece, Jack McCaffrey, one of Fenton's teammates on the Dublin six-in-a-row team , addressed the same theme. 'A Gaelic football match is 70-plus minutes,' he said. 'For the majority of it, you're just working like a dog. And the fact of the matter is, it's not enjoyable. But getting a ball in my hand, looking up and thinking 'let's go' – that's exciting.' The feeling that McCaffrey describes was captured by the boy with the lion painted on his face. At so many levels of the game, not just at the highest level, Gaelic football had lost contact with that feeling. It had become a fearful game of percentages and safe passing and suppressed imagination. Everybody was indentured to a plan that reduced the possibility of losing. For many teams, winning could only be considered after not losing was mastered. This philosophy had left the game in a bad state. Football is inherently more portable than hurling and more accessible The timing of Hell for Leather couldn't have been more opportune because this has been the most spectacular football season in living memory. The new rules have injected the games with excitement and scoreboard summersaults and an element of end-to-end sparring that had been absent for many years. The game had been kidnapped by coaching actuaries obsessed with the bottom line. To bring football back to life, it needed to be brainwashed. In a staggeringly short space of time, the new rules seem to have accomplished that mission. If this series had been broadcast last summer, the tone of love and celebration that courses through the interviews would have felt utterly at odds with a game trapped in a cycle of self-rebuke and black introspection. The synchronicity of the tone and the timing adds something vital. In Hell for Leather , some of Gaelic football's biggest stars talk about their first sporting love. Photograph: RTÉ The challenge for a series such as Hell for Leather is to explore something we already know and somehow make it feel like a new acquaintance. Gaelic football covers more of Ireland than any mobile phone network. When something is under our noses, how closely do we look? In the first episode, there is a terrific piece about the islands tournament that is played off in a blitz every summer. It comes and goes without any notice beyond the players and supporters who animate it. Just like with any sport, Gaelic football connects with people and communities in a million micro ways, but because football exists wherever Irish people are found, it bends to each habitat. Football is inherently more portable than hurling and more accessible. Hell for Leather is conscious of an audience that might only watch a handful of big games on telly every summer, but the passages about the origins of the game will be fascinating even to fanatics. The game had ancestors in rural Ireland, but no codified rules. One of the GAA's first big jobs was to make them up. 'As for the tackle,' says the historian Mark Duncan, 'you couldn't headbutt.' It seemed like no other holds were barred. The first match under the GAA's rules was played in Kilkenny and ended scoreless. Don't forget that Kilkenny won two Leinster football titles in the first 25 years of the GAA and contested four other Leinster finals. They don't talk about it much. [ Dean Rock: Armagh are now in an unbelievable position Opens in new window ] Hell for Leather is made by Crossing The Line, the same production house that delivered The Game, the acclaimed series on hurling. In every sense, it has the same texture: it is glossy and cinematic and earthy and soulful. In an exhaustive trawl, more than 80 interviews were conducted over five years. The filmmaker, Gerry Nelson, spent up to three hours with many of the subjects, and you can tell from the short, sharp snippets that appear on screen that Nelson kept digging beyond surface thoughts. 'When you think about football, life comes with it,' says Shane Walsh, the Galway footballer. Had he ever said that out loud before? This is an important portrait of a precious strand of Irish life. Just when football discovered the joy in life again. Hell for Leather, RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm
