Explore Essays and memoir
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Raqqa Road: A Syrian Escape
Claire Hajaj
‘The morning Helin walked out to die, she dressed carelessly in a loose T-shirt and jeans.’
Africa’s Future Has No Space for Stupid Black Men
Pwaangulongii Dauod
‘The night was full of energy. The kind of energy that Africa needs to reinvent itself.’
The Decay of Politics
Philip Ó Ceallaigh
‘Britain has made the control of borders and the free movement of people its central obsession, its fundamental national anxiety.’ Philip Ó Ceallaigh on Brexit.
Before They Began to Shrink
Nic Dunlop
‘The numbers killed at Aughrim that day will never be known.’
Mother and Father
Thomas Kilroy
‘Like most wars, this was a war of the young.’ Thomas Kilroy on his parents’ experience of the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish civil war.
Shifting Ground
Una Mullally
‘Living in the only democratic country in the world with a constitutional ban on abortion, I felt an acute and visceral shame.’
Blue Hills and Chalk Bones
Sinéad Gleeson
‘One day, something changes; a corporeal blip. For me, it happened in the months after turning thirteen: the synovial fluid in my left hip began to evaporate like rain.’
Republicans
James Pogue
‘This American says he’s heard of Cross but that he’s still just passing through.’ He laughed and formed the shape of a pistol with his right hand. ‘Well you heard that part, didn’t ya? That is one thing that will never change here.’
First Sentence: Mary O’Donoghue
Mary O’Donoghue
‘It’s the small stuff – and here I mean the odd particulate matter of daily life – that lets me access the sprawl of a place that wasn’t mine but has incrementally become so.’
