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Being young, Belfast, Belfast Peace Lines, bombing, Borders, Brexit, Dispatch from the Diaspora, EUFA Cup 2016, IRA, Loughinisland, Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland, Sport, The Good Friday Agreement, The Troubles, The Troubles, World Cup Football
Confronting Brexit & my Identity Crisis
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down. ~ Robert Frost Less than a week ago, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Let that sink in. I haven’t – yet. Buoyed – and delightfully distracted – by the progress of both the Ireland and Northern Ireland football teams in the 2016 UEFA European Championship, I have yet to absorb the ramifications of Brexit. It’s complicated, because it concerns who I think I am. Let’s face it, my cultural identity has…
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A Call, Coming of age, Death of parent, Dennis O'Driscoll, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Father Daughter Relationships, Father's Day, magic and loss, Saying Thank You, Seamus Heaney, The Diviner, Those Winter Sundays
what love sounds like – for father’s day
We knew love. It wasn’t a matter of declaring it. It was proven. ~ Seamus Heaney I am part of a tableau of ordinariness in which a cold beer sweats on the kitchen table, and an artichoke simmers on the stove. A man who makes me smile checks for doneness. Again. It is not quite ready, so his daughter adds more water. Laughing and lovely and impatient to eat, she spies an apple and asks her daddy to slice it. A pause and then a familiar tune – the honing – and I am lifted out of the ordinary. Unbeknownst to them, I have left the scene. I am adolescent and annoyed, stirring to the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel in our house…
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Damian Gorman, Devices of Detachment, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Mass shootings, Orlando, The Troubles, Themes of childhood
blood on my hands and yours . . . from sea to shining sea
Since he took office, President Obama has had to publicly address sixteen mass shootings in these United States. Sixteen times he has stared into a camera and uttered the best words for the worst of times knowing he will probably have to do it again. Each time, we listen to him, we ask why, and we shake our heads and shed tears in disbelief. And each time, when the media abandons the story and the families of the victims, we go away too. We abandon them too. When it happens again, as it always does, our revulsion returns. For a day or two, maybe a week, we are forced to confront the reality…
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Ali – you shook up our world. No mercy.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see. It’s the summer of 1987. I have no job and no clue where I’m headed other than toward some vague notion of America. I arrived at Kennedy airport, complete with big hair and a backpack full of nothing useful except a Sony Walkman and a handful of cassette tapes. Were it not for Nils Lofgren filling my head most days, I might have just caught the next plane back home. “No Mercy” resonated with me, a song that told me Nils Lofgren understood something about a boxer’s experience that had as much to do with…
