Dry warm June. Tight clockwise circuit buried in one of Galway’s west side housing estates. Five right handers, two left handers, 2 speed bumps, …
From up on Garraun you can see out along Renvyle peninsula. Glasilaun, Lettergesh, Mullaghloss, and Tullycross somewhere hidden. Names known since I’ve known names.
Distilled summers of wave on wave, collapsing in rushes, scrambling down grassy slopes. The sea so …
I’m hunched down under a little umbrella, my back against a rock face on the mountainside, and through drumming hail sunlight beams from under a turreted and tendrilled bank of Atlantic cloud.
Cold. Fresh. Soft. The loft-frozen pellets hop and …
Winter still on duty:
Drops dusk early
Provokes depressions to jostle over the Atlantic
And this one brings fierce hail,
Stinging along the coast
I run
For poor shelter under wavebashed rock
Scattering sea birds
Into jolted gale-hung grace
And …
The last ‘proper’ snow here was back in 2010/2011, when things got real cold, as low as -15, and pipes were splitting up and down the country. In Ireland we basically call society off when it goes below -5. Most …
Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security – where is the cutting edge?
March 24th, NUI Galway
What is CCAFS? In their own words, “The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) will address the increasing challenge …
“Proclamayssion two yuuroos! Proclamyssion only two yurooos!”
The proclamations are mostly in the plastic bag, but a few are held up to passers by. Outside the G.P.O., under the narrow pin of the Spire, on the wide, fast food epicentre …
One day, one camera, one roll of film. Point it at yourself. Try to make it an eye in the sky, a documenter of who you are and where you are and what’s going on one randomly selected day. Dig …
Berlin
Layers of city,
History piled on history
Hills of rubble assembled into calm parks
Segways converging on an Opera square outside Humbolt
Car park treads over Adolf’s final bunker
Trabants and Mercedes and the odd Porsche
The Soviet ambitions …
Here it comes, there it goes. The Christmas break, with its long buildup and heavily marketed stature, has already left the building before it seemed to even arrive.
The rains barely paused for breath, though the good winds provided enough …
It happened before, though the levels this time are higher. In 2006, for the first time in the history of a family home built almost a century before, winter waters reached the doors and spilled into the kitchen.
Nine years …
Storm Desmond is still battering its way across Ireland and the U.K., having already dumped a month’s worth of rain in some areas. The local radio stations along the west coast have become live feeds of lists of blocked roads, …
It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools. But what craftsman has no tools at all? Where would we be, scrawling bison on caves Not that there is anything wrong with that, and indeed your latest work is exceptional and …
Summer was a long haul of slosh and soakings, and then finally in Autumn dry stretches fuse into a few weeks of easy goings and comings, crunch of leaf underfoot, mudless soles, no winds worth their leaning into. Come November …
It’s a little bit of dark, a little bit of chaos, a lot of imagination, and a stick to shake at the arriving winter. Dwell in the dark, take refuge in the symbols, there is energy and density in the …
It is the last race of the road season for me, but I don’t know it.
I don’t know it until halfway through stage 2 when the bunch is going down a straight descent into Dungarvin. A rider comes down …
A big blue tent, in a grassy field, between a cathedral and the River Corrib, July 2015. The Little Green Cars open for St Vincent’s Digital Witness, the feature preeesentation. For a change it’s not raining, though it’s not exactly …
Kennedy’s Bar, Galway, July 2015, during the Galway Arts Festival.
But this isn’t the official Arts Festival. This is the low budget tagalong sibling, raised on handmedowns and shorn of ‘big’ names: the Galway Fringe Festival. Smaller venues, smaller fuss, …
Máméan, Pass of the Birds
According to legend, St. Patrick blessed Connemara from a well at the top of the pass, and slept there (“Leaba Padraic”=”Patrick’s bed”), though to my limited knowledge there was stuff going on there before that …
The Glann road follows the western edge of Lough Corrib from Oughterard towards Maam, ending close to the foothills of the Maamturk mountains. The lake narrows towards its Northwestern corner, with peninsulas like the Hill of Doon coming within a …