Fintan O’Toole: Shining light on abortion – one of Ireland’s ‘unknown knowns’‘We all owe a debt to Róisín Ingle and Tara Flynn who have written so honestly about their experiences of having abortions’Tue Sept 15 2015 - 05:00
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1959 – Sive, by John B KeaneThe Co Kerry playwright’s mix of melodrama and myth was a cocktail so powerful that it blew the head off a country that was tired of a stifling orthodoxySat Sept 12 2015 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: Fennelly report exposes a system of ‘cockspiracy’‘The stroke demands bad administration – no records, no clarity, no actual relationship between supposed cause (the taping) and desired effect (Callinan’s resignation)’Tue Sept 08 2015 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Must we see dead babies to imagine a catastrophe?‘A Europe that turns its face against the plight of the refugees is a Europe that is killing itself’Mon Sept 07 2015 - 07:26
Fintan O’Toole: Beyond belief – why grant Disney’s Skelligs wish for Star Wars?When monks founded their settlement on Skellig Michael they were literally going to extremesFri Sept 04 2015 - 13:52
Van Morrison: ‘Being famous is not great for the creative process. Not for me, anyway’After 50 years in the music business Van Morrison – born in Belfast 70 years ago, on August 31st, 1945 – has no game to play, no impression to make, no line to sell. His music and his creativity are still what matter mostSat Aug 29 2015 - 08:00
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1957 – Irisches Tagebuch, by Heinrich BöllIn his quirky, incisive account of life on Achill, Heinrich Böll celebrated the consoling power of a simple life on the edge of EuropeSat Aug 29 2015 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: If we want to change squalid public services we must raise taxes‘Proportionally, the Irish State raises only about 80 per cent of the revenue raised by the average euro-zone state’Tue Aug 11 2015 - 05:00
Summers Past: Fintan O’Toole, his father and son walk the Wicklow Way, 1990You can walk for miles every day with a four-year-old – as long as you know your musicals. A new series revisits some of our best summer features from years gone byMon Aug 10 2015 - 08:30
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1954 – The Quare Fellow, by Brendan BehanBrendan Behan’s experiences banged up in the porridge set the stage for his anti-capital punishment masterpiece, a drama about waiting, and waiting some more, for the inevitable hangman’s ropeSat Aug 08 2015 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: Here’s a hard choice for politicians with backboneHow about free primary education instead of a cut in inheritance tax?Tue Aug 04 2015 - 10:33
Fintan O’Toole: Here’s something else you may not know about The Gleneagle‘Killarney hotel was at the centre of some classic Celtic Tiger rezoning shenanigans’Tue Jul 28 2015 - 05:00
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1952 – En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), by Samuel BeckettBeckett’s absurdist masterpiece, which he wrote first in French, looks squarely at ‘humanity in ruins’ after the second World War – but still finds ways to be funny, touching and oddly beautifulSun Jul 26 2015 - 09:00
Culture Shock: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, which is why we’re drawn to Russian dramaBrian Friel plays up the farce in his version of Turgenev’s ‘A Month in the Country’, but Ethan McSweeny’s production at the Gate Theatre in Dublin seems reluctant to go all the waySat Jul 25 2015 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Europe divided by a sense of crisis and a sea of amnesia‘This is not a moment in European history – it is at least two parallel moments’Tue Jul 21 2015 - 16:28
Tormenting Greece is about sending a message that we are now in a new EUNo deeper divide than that between those brought to heel and those who shout ‘Heel!’Tue Jul 14 2015 - 16:02
Fintan O’Toole: EU has taken decisive turn from democracyWe EU subjects have our own supreme ayatollahs of fiscal correctness nowTue Jul 07 2015 - 17:15
Who will dare say out loud ‘emperor has no clothes’?Fintan O'Toole: Myths about Ireland as Europe’s best behaved state are not harmless liesWed Jul 01 2015 - 14:11
Fintan O’Toole: Us and them – the two faces of migration‘Migration is the world’s way of reminding the West that it cannot distance itself from the human catastrophes it has unleashed’Sat Jun 27 2015 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Poorest will be hardest hit by lone-parent cut‘Back to School allowance for clothes and shoes were cut by one-third in 2014 from €150 to €100 for primary school children aged four to 11’Tue Jun 23 2015 - 13:21
Culture Shock: Garry Hynes’s astonishing, exhilarating ‘DruidShakespeare’The director’s extraordinary take on Shakespeare’s Henry plays, reworked by Mark O’Rowe and starring Aisling O’Sullivan, Derbhle Crotty and Marty Rea, feels like a sweeping epic as a whole, but moment by moment it feels intimate and detailedFri Jun 19 2015 - 14:00
Fintan O’Toole: Public interest, private initiative – what must change‘There is a myth of the self-made man, the rugged individualist who succeeds in building an empire in spite of the nanny State’Tue Jun 16 2015 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: The ‘deaccessioning’ of art – an ugly word for an ugly deed‘The tale of the Beit paintings merely puts some more glamorous touches to a drearily familiar canvas’Sat Jun 13 2015 - 09:39
No WB Yeats, no Samuel Beckett? Fintan O’Toole on why we mustn’t forget the poet’s playsLike Beckett, Yeats imagined every detail of his plays on the stage. Like Beckett, he has to be done well or not at all. And his ideas are now even more urgentWed Jun 10 2015 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: Denis O’Brien’s influence and the meaning of press freedom‘Announcement suggests that, whatever the bluster, Denis O’Brien does not take seriously the prospect that the Fine Gael-led government will do anything either to curb his current media power or to stop its future expansion’Tue Jun 09 2015 - 05:00
Irish culture in 1945 was both lively and bleakThe ‘Irish Times’ Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks project has published its first 30 entries, covering 1916-1945 – a time of paradoxical philistinism and creativitySat Jun 06 2015 - 06:00
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1945 – The Demon Lover and Other Stories, by Elizabeth BowenThe writer used her unique imagination to devastating effect in these storiesSat Jun 06 2015 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: Loud silence on public interest in Siteserv affair‘The definition of excessive private power is that it ceases to be private’Tue Jun 02 2015 - 09:05
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1944 – Prayer Before Birth, by Louis MacNeiceThe Belfast-born poet was deeply unhappy about Ireland’s stance on the second World War. He could not accept neutrality in a decisive struggle against fascismSat May 30 2015 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: Poverty, in our republic of equals, is written on children’s bodiesThose from Yes and No sides should unite to end child poverty by 2020Tue May 26 2015 - 05:00
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland has left ‘tolerance’ far behindLGBT community has given all of Irish democracy one of its greatest daysMon May 25 2015 - 12:27
Culture Shock: Why I worry for the unfair representation of psychotic Provo priests‘The Belle of Belfast’, an Oirish play that’s a hit off Broadway, proves the Martin McDonagh effect. He brilliantly pastiches the cliches of 1940s Irish drama. But it’s dangerously easy to mistake his dark ironies and twisted comic exaggerations for a kind of realismFri May 22 2015 - 14:00
Fintan O’Toole: Marriage was nothing to be proud of in 1983Legal changes over the years profoundly altered the state of marriage for the betterWed May 20 2015 - 10:12
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1942 – The Great Hunger, by Patrick KavanaghThe poet skewers traditional depictions of Irish country life and highlights the era’s sexual sterility in his long satirical workSat May 16 2015 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: ‘Keep your drawers on and pray’ doesn’t cut it‘I had a vasectomy 25 years ago, so our “union” has not been “open to life” for a quarter of a century. We’re not a proper family’Tue May 12 2015 - 11:39
Fintan O’Toole: Religious conservatives want to have cake and eat itVerdict in Belfast ‘gay cake’ near but the case dovetails with a wider reactionary argumentTue May 05 2015 - 07:06
Lost for words: Irish writing on the first World WarThere is no convenient canon of Irish war literature, like that which appeared in Britain, even though Ireland had three towering literary figures in Shaw, Yeats and Joyce at the time, working at the pinnacles of poetry, prose and dramaTue May 05 2015 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: Welcome to ‘The Paddysucker Proxy’A prototype answer for all Irish scandals: a sheet of paper with a big O on itTue Apr 28 2015 - 05:00
Culture Shock: Please, no more heroes. Let’s not turn the obscenities of Gallipoli and the Great War into gloryWhat’s heroic about being mown down as you wade towards a beach before you’ve even had the chance to fire a shot? What could ever be heroic about the racist folly of that Dardanelles campaign anyway?Sat Apr 25 2015 - 12:55
Fintan O’Toole: Why court ruling on evidence is bad for democracy‘The Supreme Court did a terrible day’s work for accountability in Irish public life’Tue Apr 21 2015 - 05:00
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1938 – Pray for the Wanderer, by Kate O’BrienThe author of the once-banned novel ‘Mary Lavelle’ deals fearlessly with ‘the problems of the Catholic conscience’Sat Apr 18 2015 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: Last gasp for the Irish political machine?The Irish political machine is dying in Chicago – is it on the way out in Ireland too?Tue Apr 14 2015 - 05:00
Dunnes policy an assault on dignity of working peopleCulture of zero-hour contract, which Dunnes has been trying to embed, an assault on all that Dunnes once helped to defineTue Apr 07 2015 - 08:39
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1936 – Katie Roche, by Teresa DeevyIn the 1930s Teresa Deevy was a star Abbey writer. Then, suddenly, she was dropped. Were the questions she raised about the lives of Irish women too difficult to face?Sat Apr 04 2015 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: The crisis is over – so when does the cruelty stop?Waiting for review of funding to 23 organisations that provide support services for people with chronic disabilitiesTue Mar 31 2015 - 05:00
Culture Shock: Social rights and Hollywood wrongs – why Rambo has a lot to answer for‘The Imitation Game’ and ‘Selma’ have both been scrutinised for historical accuracy. Is it fair to expect film-makers to stick to the unvarnished truth?Sat Mar 28 2015 - 02:00
Fintan O’Toole: Stability can only come from radical changeFor how many of its 93 years of existence has the State been economically successful?Tue Mar 24 2015 - 09:13
Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1934 – Devoted Ladies, by Molly KeaneThe playwright and novelist demythologised the world of the Irish big house, depicting its decline with a masterly combination of light touch and heavy heartSat Mar 21 2015 - 01:00
Fintan O’Toole: Sinn Féin does not seem to see difference between truth and lies‘What makes Sinn Féin’s flesh creep and its stomach heave?’Tue Mar 17 2015 - 05:00
