If you are driving from Falcarrig or Gortahurk towards Churchill in County Donegal and if you take the road which goes through the Gap of Muckish you pass through what must be one of the most desolate and barren parts of this country. Nothing seems to grow. The only relief from the stark greyness of the place are the coloured bags of turf that dot the landscape every so often. Colm Toibin writes more about Derek Hill's art collection.  Add a comment

Hugh Leonards play, Da, currently running at the Abbey, opens with an episode which is conducted without words. The central character, Charlie, is burning his father's papers and other rubbish in the cottage in Dalkey, having just come back from the funeral. He botches the job, through indecision, interruption, uncertainty; and out of that emerges the play. But just for those opening moments we witness, in dumb show, one of the cruellest and most painful occasions in life, the reading and the shredding of the evidence in a case that has finally been closed. Add a comment

It's a cool and cloudy Friday night as our taxi cruises to a halt outside the Wembley Arena. Hundreds of hopefuls are hanging around in the unlikely chance of getting a ticket at some kind of reasonable price. The ticket touts have them, and they're all over the place asking up to £400 for a £10 ticket. Inside, stall-sellers are flogging every conceivable form of Bowie paraphernalia. Earrings, key-rings, various teeshirts, glossy souvenir programmes. Money changes hands even faster at several bars dispensing pint-size plastic cups of bitter and lager.

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Last year's exhibition of paintings by Michael Mulcahy at the Lincoln Gallery was a patchy affair, consising of a handful of large pictures which had bold, direct magic, and others that were less penetrating. One felt that Mulcahy was not really in command of his talent, that he was a prolific painter who was occasionally seized by a spirit and moved by it. When the spirit chose to make an appearance the pictures hit their mark; when the artist himself tried to summon inspiration, the mastery was gone. Add a comment

On Thursday May 5 1983 big ignorant John Feeney wrote a story in the Evening Herald which had no basis in fact.
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Travels in the Soviet Union by Anthony Cronin Add a comment

The reader of Joyce visiting Dublin for the first time will know what to look for: the river, the National Library, the Bailey or the tower in Sandymount. Similarly, the visitor to Robert Ballagh's house will be watching out for the key items that appear in his autobiographical paintings. There will have to be an upstairs and a downstairs in his house: the paintings say so. There will have to be a spiral staircase in his house: it runs through two of the paintings like the Liffey through "Finnegans Wake". There will have been some recent changes in the decor because one recent painting is called "After Modernisation". And if you look carefully you will see that the room in "Inside No 3" has been enlarged.

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In Brian Bourke's recent exhibition at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin there are nearly forty paintings and drawings of his wife Jay Murphy. Most of them are entitled "Portrait of J with a Basque Hat" and in these Jay Murphy is wearing this extraordinary hat. She's wearing it again and again all over the walls of two rooms of the gallery. Everywhere you look, she's wearing it. The show at first looks very funny; Brian Bourke has made her face into a caricature of itself, almost a cartoon. It's only when you stop looking at a wall or these paintings and start looking at one of them, you realise that Bourke's intentions are serious.

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