Blog
My last year in school and my first year in isolation
I never expected a pandemic in my Leaving Cert year. Last September, I naively walked in through my school gates and pictured late night cramming sessions, 3-hour exams, and a… | Read on »
Expertise and folk knowledge at a time of pandemic
This is an expanded discussion of an article that first appeared in The Sunday Independent (Ireland), 26 April 2020, p. 27. Critiquing novelty “Novel coronavirus”. This phrase has rapidly come… | Read on »
We Need More than Just Scientists to Document the Pandemic
This crisis is as much about society and politics as it is about virology, immunology and economics https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/0421/1132824-why-we-need-more-than-just-scientists-to-document-the-pandemic/, posted 21 April 2020. Remarkable efforts have been made by a host of researchers… | Read on »
Covid-19 and the Swedish Experience: Notes from Umeå, Northern Sweden
In August 2019, I moved from Galway to Umeå, northern Sweden, with my family to take up a two-year Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellowship. A key part of the MSCA scheme… | Read on »
David Gange on Máiréad Robinson
The landscape writer and historian David Gange reflects on meeting Mairéad Robinson in Roundstone. This piece, part of a longer post on 29 March, appeared before Máiréad’s husband, Tim Robinson,… | Read on »
Happy In? Ageing and Ageism in the Age of Coronavirus and Cocooning
A version of this article appeared on RTE Brainstorm It is almost a century since WB Yeats lamented that Ireland ‘was no country for old men.’ Yeats was just 60… | Read on »
Covid-19 and the Spectre of the 1630 Plague in Italy
Almost four hundred years before the Covid-19 crisis another devastating epidemic hit particularly hard northern Italy In the period between early March and early April of this year, as the… | Read on »
Farewell to a Master who Mapped out Our Nation’s Place in the World: Tim Robinson (1935-2020)
Tim Robinson and his wife Mairead gave Ireland back a vital part of our history and heritage. Sunday Independent (Ireland), 12 April 2020, p. 23. Memory is a treacherous thing…. | Read on »
Memories of Mary McPartlan – Colleague and Friend
Your beautiful rich voice singing ‘Rainy Night in Soho’ or singing of ‘ancestors’ bones’ or of ‘Barbara Allen’… the banter and the craic of an evening shared together with colleagues…. And plans, plans and ideas hatched for what… | Read on »
The Inexorable Rise of the Pandemic State? Second-Guessing the long-term political repercussions of COVID 19
When COVID-19 ends as a pandemic, what will be the political repercussions? Will there be lasting consequences for states and their relationships with citizens, markets or societies more generally? How… | Read on »