Patrick Freyne: I joined a gym this year. Here’s how working out is working outI’m not entirely sedentary these days. I walk a lot. But recently I was talking to my GP and she suggested that I should also use my arms sometimesSun Dec 29 2024 - 06:00
Culchiecore, bonkbusters, murder, more murder and Nationwide: What I’ve seen on TV in 2024Patrick Freyne on the 2 Johnnies, Rivals, Say Nothing, Baby Reindeer and television trends of the past 12 monthsThu Dec 19 2024 - 05:00
Patrick Freyne: I am becoming a demotivational speaker – let’s all have an averagely productive DecemberI keep meeting people who are extremely burned out. I meet them so often that I’m beginning to think burnout is something that exists by designSat Dec 14 2024 - 06:00
‘Watch your step’: Steve Coogan takes Patrick Freyne backstage at Dr StrangeloveThe comic actor is playing four parts in the new stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s film, which comes to Ireland in 2025Sat Dec 14 2024 - 05:30
Wake up, people: Here’s what the mainstream media don’t want you to know about ChristmasFrom Santy and selection boxes to Christmas pudding and Mariah Carey, these are some of the truths you won’t hear elsewhereThu Dec 12 2024 - 05:00
Actor Edward Norton on environmental activism: ‘If you find it inconvenient, I think that’s precisely the f**king point’Norton might be best known for his blockbuster Hollywood roles, but the actor is also a committed environmentalist and successful entrepreneurSun Dec 08 2024 - 05:00
Joan Baez: Do I ever hear from Bob Dylan? ‘Not a word’Looking young and powerful at 83, Baez is still engaged in politics, but has recently revealed a dark secretSat Dec 07 2024 - 06:00
What do women want? A hunky idiot without a past, that’s whatHot Frosty, Netflix’s latest reboot of The Snowman, at last brings some ‘hubba-hubba, vroom-vroom, arooooga!’ to Raymond Briggs’s family favouriteThu Dec 05 2024 - 05:00
Read this before you vote: Patrick Freyne’s vibes-based guide to Election 2024From HR Pufnstuf to Battlestar Galactica, what can we learn from political television shows through the ages before we go to the ballot box?Thu Nov 28 2024 - 05:00
Patrick Freyne: My favourite corporate psy-ops of the season – or Christmas ads, as they’re called in the suburbs Patrick Freyne: here are my favourite corporate psy-ops of the season – or Christmas TV ads, as I believe you call them in the suburbsThu Nov 21 2024 - 05:00
Dublin’s crack cocaine epidemic: ‘You get a rush. You come down. And then you have to go again’Crack cocaine is the new heroin, say addicts and frontline support workers, its use and widespread availability an epidemic that is getting worseSat Nov 09 2024 - 06:00
‘We’re in uncharted territory’: Why the forgotten threat of nuclear war presents real and present dangerWith the Doomsday Clock set at 90 seconds to midnight, the US and Russia’s Cold War stand-off seems quaint in retrospectSun Nov 03 2024 - 06:00
No Magic Pill: ‘If you cast disabled actors, they bring with their performance the lived experience of disability’It’s time for professional productions to use disabled actors for both disabled and nondisabled characters, say playwright Christian O’Reilly and his colleaguesSat Nov 02 2024 - 05:15
Doctor Odyssey’s core message: just imagine Pacey from Dawson’s Creek holding you tight and saying, ‘Shhh, it’s okay’Patrick Freyne: Cruising takes on an alternative meaning in this medical melodrama, with Joshua Jackson visiting multiple ports of callThu Oct 31 2024 - 05:00
John Creedon: ‘I was always being sent away, not because they didn’t love me, but because they couldn’t cope’Broadcaster and author reflects on an unusual childhood in Cork, constant low-level anxiety and presenting Winning Streak without understanding the rulesSat Oct 26 2024 - 05:00
Rivals: The thrusting bum is intercut with spurting soap and overflowing champagne. We are in safe, if filthy, handsPatrick Freyne: If I was in Disney+’s Jilly Cooper adaptation, someone would surely compliment my ‘magnificent column’Thu Oct 24 2024 - 05:00
Changing career midlife: ‘At 45 I thought I was finished... But it didn’t even occur to me that I could do anything else’More and more people are opting to switch professions in midlife. We talk to three people who have taken the plungeSun Oct 20 2024 - 05:01
Long-lost story by Dracula author Bram Stoker unearthed at National Library of IrelandGibbet Hill, the Irish writer’s macabre tale of a man set upon by strange children at the site of a real murder, was discovered by Dublin researcher Brian ClearySat Oct 19 2024 - 00:00
The 2 Johnnies – what you get if you feed Ant and Dec a Tayto sandwich after midnight – are taunting us nowAs I get sucked into this regional boosterism, I feel something change in me. Do I ... actually like it?Thu Oct 17 2024 - 05:00
Patrick Freyne: Where does Love in the Country find its taciturn Irishmen? I thought they had gone from this isle, like elk and shameAnna Geary is such a good host that she’d probably want to help rural romantics find the partner of their dreams even if RTÉ wasn’t filming itThu Oct 10 2024 - 05:00
Michael Harding: ‘Solitude sounds beautiful, but what you get is isolation’The Irish Times columnist on ageing, the double-edged nature of solitude, and his new memoir’s focus on his distant relationship with his fatherSun Oct 06 2024 - 05:00
Instagram star Garron Noone: ‘I’ve been broke most of my life. I’ve cleaned up people’s puke for money. Success is a transient thing’The TikTok and Instagram star, who is hosting a new podcast, has grown used to attention from strangers. Not all of it is welcomeSat Sept 28 2024 - 05:30
A Romani survivor of Nazi terror: ‘Young people, babies, infants, were beaten to death’ Holocaust survivor Christian Pfeil says ‘it’s important to remind society again and again that this actually happened’, especially at a time when right-wing extremism is growing across EuropeSun Sept 22 2024 - 06:00
Watch as these bellowing beasts – the three kinds of ageing Englishman – roam the plains one last time On The Grand Tour: One for the Road, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May bow out of their Prime Video car showThu Sept 19 2024 - 05:00
Outlast feels like another trial run for the collapse of civilisationThe reality for the survivalists on this terribly named Netflix show is a bit mundane and not even particularly wolf filledThu Sept 12 2024 - 05:00
Dylan Moran: ‘Everybody now is in a boiling froth of panic the whole time... we’ve completely regressed’Navan native talks about stealing records, being a ‘rainbow goth’ and how a trio featuring Ardal O’Hanlon led him to his comedic callingSun Sept 08 2024 - 05:30
‘It’s a beauty pageant that’s not about beauty’: New Zealand Rose celebrates victory and her Irish heritageKeely O’Grady says Ireland and New Zealand have similar experiences of colonialismWed Aug 21 2024 - 13:32
Patrick Freyne: I ooh as one Rose plays the spoons, aah as another risks ripping a hole in the space-time continuumThe second night of the Rose of Tralee International Festival is always when my cynicism retreats and I drink the red lemonadeTue Aug 20 2024 - 22:00
Rose of Tralee 2024: ‘When nobody knew about the festival everyone wanted to come’Tralee is ‘a place where love is in the air’ as the Kerry festival returns once againTue Aug 20 2024 - 00:32
Rose of Tralee: ‘Roses at Mass. Roses going on the merries ... Time is frozen, you could say’The 32 Roses participate in parades and other events for the 64th year of the festival before the competition beginsSun Aug 18 2024 - 19:23
‘We are caring for your parents like they are our parents - but we can’t bring our families here’Many migrant workers who care for our most vulnerable have been separated from their families for years due to a €30,000 earnings restriction. Campaigners are seeking urgent changesSat Jul 27 2024 - 06:00
Who is Colin O’Sullivan, the Irish author behind the big Apple TV show Sunny?Haven’t heard of the Irish writer? He moved to Japan to teach English for a year. That was more than 20 years ago. His life there gives him lots of time for his fiction, he saysSat Jul 27 2024 - 05:15
Anthony Hopkins’s new prestige drama has given me a great idea. It involves buttocksThose About to Die: Anyone can achieve their dreams if their father is an emperorThu Jul 25 2024 - 05:00
Danny Dyer could play a flautist in wartime Budapest, Percy Bysshe Shelley or Jesus Christ. He’s just that goodInstead he must play a cockney geezer with a penchant for violence but a heart of gold, over and over. He’s good at that, tooThu Jul 18 2024 - 05:00
Yvonne McGuinness: ‘I’m much more at ease in the muck of a field with a class of nine-year-olds than I am with a red carpet’Dublin artist Yvonne McGuinness lives on the fringes of a starry world, thanks to her marriage to Cillian Murphy, but says she feels more at ease in a mucky field than on a red carpetSat Jul 13 2024 - 05:00
Nathan Carter’s Castlerea prison concert: Patrick Freyne goes behind the scenes of a surreal gigEvent in aid of paediatric ward in Sligo hospital, Mayo hospice and Roscommon youth servicesFri Jul 12 2024 - 06:00
Patrick Freyne: Fish-out-of-water TV is back and it’s great fun altogetherLiteral fish-out-of-water dramas are short and sadly predictable but here are my figurative favouritesThu Jul 11 2024 - 05:00
These Criminal Minds folks look and sound as if they work for AccentureThe behavioural-analysis unit all feel like the sort of people who can do accounts. That might be why I default to the A-Team when I try to think about themThu Jun 27 2024 - 05:00
Gabor Maté: I began to notice that the people who got chronically ill had trouble saying ‘no’One of the most influential thinkers of the 21st century, Maté believes our dysfunctional societies are making us illThu Jun 20 2024 - 06:00
Joey Essex was raised by television, his mother a camera, his father a boom microphoneI’m pretty sure even Joey Essex doesn’t know he’s on Love Island. He probably thinks he’s just on holiday with his family, the camera equipmentThu Jun 20 2024 - 05:12
Irish composer Jennifer Walshe on AI music: ‘If you came up with the idea for I Glued My Balls to My Butthole Again, is that art?’The Oxford professor of composition’s long use of artificial intelligence in her work makes her a good judge of its merits and its dangersSat Jun 15 2024 - 05:30
‘They have very few opportunities to be happy’: Syrian child refugees face bleak future in LebanonAfter the Syrian war began in 2011, 1½ million Syrian refugees entered Lebanon. Initially the nation was welcoming, but since the economy collapsed in 2019, anti-refugee sentiment has grownFri Jun 14 2024 - 11:00
Jedis were once a seasoning, like salt. We liked the salt, and now Disney is serving us big bowls of saltThe Acolyte, Disney’s emotionally and visually flat new Star Wars spin-off, needs to stop with all the confusing lightsabre fightsThu Jun 13 2024 - 05:00
Burj al Barajneh refugee camp: ‘It is a continuous tragedy’Site in Beirut originally established for 500 families but is now home to 18,000 Palestinians and 40,000 SyriansSat Jun 08 2024 - 06:00
‘Our mental health is completely destroyed. We are living in constant sadness’More than 90,000 people, including 30,000 children, have been displaced from their homes since October; 250 of them are living in the Tyre Technical SchoolSat Jun 08 2024 - 06:00
Oliver Callan: ‘I should have got the same as Ryan Tubridy was being offered’The broadcaster and satirist on political pressure, suffering ‘five years of horrific coercive control’, and replacing TubridySat Jun 08 2024 - 05:00
Patrick Freyne’s Irish festivalgoer guide: 11 kinds of people and things to avoidIf you’re heading for Electric Picnic, All Together Now or Beyond the Pale this summer, bewareSun May 26 2024 - 05:15
From Nicola Coughlan’s hunks in landscaped gardens to Cillian Murphy’s gripping gangster romp: Patrick Freyne’s costume drama guideWith the return of Bridgerton, here’s a guide to costume dramaThu May 23 2024 - 05:15
Patrick Freyne: Doctor Who’s Space Babies definitely went to an Educate Together schoolPatrick Freyne: Doctor Who allows adults to enjoy swashbuckling adventures without feeling patronised and allows children to access something dark and weird while feeling safeThu May 16 2024 - 05:00
Steve Albini taught thousands of musicians that ethics and politics are embedded in business and art Producer provided a counterpoint to those stars who preach while avoiding tax or the consequences of their own work practicesMon May 13 2024 - 06:00
