Today, the exam silly season got started again. It’s exactly twenty years since I did my Leaving – twenty-two since my Inter (what they used to call the Junior Cert). People in the media are offering a lot of advice on how to handle the ordeal, trying to reassure everyone who’s heading into those exams. But with the best…
This letter has been sent to my local representatives, to the Minister for Education and Skills, to the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs. I am writing to you to protest at the potential loss of an absolutely vital programme for young people, not through cuts but through simple inaction. The Junior Cert Support…
My Weird-Wide News posts are normally aimed at my younger readers. So I’m going to try and keep this simple, even though it is one of the weirdest posts I’ve done. But it is real. And yet it’s hardly made the normal news at all. I got it from the UK newspaper, ‘The Telegraph’. Britain has a much better…
I picked this one off David Maybury’s blog the other day. Research done by the National Literacy Trust in the UK has discovered that more kids over there own a mobile phone (86%) than own a book (73%). All the more reason to produce books that can be read on phones, don’t you think? I can’t say I was…
We were in Portlaoise last weekend, and I took my daughter to a playground in a small town park, while her mum and brother were off watching a football match. She was too young to watch the game and too old – and too mad – to sit still on our laps. The playground was a decent one; the…
Maybe it’s because of the fact that I put my back out recently. Or it might be because I did a talk on (and drawing of) Dorian Gray in Ballymun Library, and in an attempt to engage the minds of those cagey teenagers, I spoke about how we age and how, even in our teens, life has already left…
I was tempted to start this post with ‘And so it begins . . .’, but that would be wrong. Because Google’s leviathan-like surfacing in the book market has been a long time coming. Google Editions, the company’s new online bookstore, is due to start selling this summer. I have mixed feelings about Google’s strategy. On one hand, I’ve…
This afternoon, I was at a function in the headquarters of the Arts Council to celebrate the announcement of Ireland’s first ever Children’s Laureate. A host of us crowded into the room to hear President Mary McAleese declare Siobhan Parkinson our first Laureate. So for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t spend half their life immersed in the children’s…
So I did my back in. I managed to get a new TV corner unit on special offer, and had help getting it into the car, but had to get it out on my own. I was well impressed with my own display of Herculean strength, until I got up the following day with a stiff back – a…
Charles Stross, one of the UK’s most successful sci-fi writers, and a compulsive and prolific blogger, has written a series of posts about writing for a living, but there’s one post I think everyone should see, about the lifestyle of a writer. There are a lot of blunt truths here – though there are some key differences in the…