Dear ME...

One of my favourite places in Cork is the Marina, from the Pairc all the way down to Blackrock village. The serenity it offers to those who pound the cracked concrete there is second to none. It’s one of few places left in the city where you could imagine that you are in the countryside; the sounds of the lapping water and the wind that gushes up the river embankment and through the trees offer as soothing a melody as the crashing of waves against West Cork rocks. As you approach Blackrock, a fleeting glance across the river offers a stark contrast to this serenity, as consumerism and the pursuit of economic growth shows us its duller and more ugly side. Cargo comes and goes. Containers are lifted on and off of ships, as the sound of steel on steel fills the port, all the while the smell of diesel filling your nostrils. To those who regularly row up the river Lee, a glance from port to starboard side show two different worlds, on one side all of mans creations and desires, on the othe…

“Je suis Charlie”. It is a phrase that will remain etched in the collective psyche of the world for some time to come, a phrase which passed the lips of almost every western world leader in recent weeks. We are Charlie. But are they? Are we? January wasn’t a good time to shine an investigative light on to global politics. In recent weeks, in scenes reminiscent of an elongated political parody, we saw a collection of world leaders march in solidarity through the streets of Paris, to defend and promote the idea of free speech, the correct response to such an attack on it. Yet, only two weeks later we witnessed them mourn the death of the King of Saudi Arabia, in the very same month Saudi Arabia’s oppressive regime was giving 1000 lashes to Raif Badawi for attempting to exercise the same free speech the leaders of the ‘free world’ professed to care about so much. Remember, this was a right so fundamental to these leader’s societies that they marched through sombre Paris streets, hand in …