How was it for you? Eoghan O’Sullivan and Colette Sheridan select their highlights of the year
Our regular contributors select their highlights of the year
Eoghan O'Sullivan
I went to Iceland for the first time in November for the showcase festival Iceland Airwaves — the highlight was Dublin band Fontaines DC. A tiny venue, a low roof, and a band ready to break — the perfect mix. Is it too real for ya?
Earlier in the year, I saw the brilliant soul band Young Fathers twice in a fortnight, in the Academy and the inaugural It Takes a Village festival in Trabolgan. The latter concluded with shouts of ‘Repeal, repeal, repeal!’ A powerful moment.
I finally got to see the Australian singer/guitarist Courtney Barnett in the Olympia in November and it was a stellar show. Only a few words spoken to the crowd and then just killer song after killer song.
I made over 40 episdes of my podcast, The Point of Everything, this year and talked to plenty of Irish artists. Dublin’s Paddy Hanna, who released a brilliant album in Frankly, I Mutate, stands out because he was just so honest about the travails of being an artist. It was also a real highlight to chat to Donal Dineen at It Takes a Village.
Sally Rooney’s Normal People was lavished with praise months ahead of release and often that can work against a book. But Rooney (below) brushes it all off. Her novel, about two young lovers from the west who move to Dublin for university and run the gamut of emotions, is sparkling, a vivid, oh-so-relatable dripping-in-emotions story.
It was also a great year for non- fiction and it’s no surprise that Tramp Press are responsible for Notes to Self, the debut essay collection from Emilie Pine that everyone has been talking about for months. You should gift it to everyone in your life this Christmas.
Black Panther, below, was as great as I wanted it to be — it felt fresh and exciting, and with the best bad guy in a superhero film in years. Then Michael B Jordan went from Killmonger to Creed for another electrifying outing in the boxing franchise. Its in-ring shots are breathtaking.
I binged Derry Girls in one sitting while in my man flu-ridden bed in February. It hurt to laugh — and I laughed a lot. The best comedy of the year. Succession was as outlandish as I’d expected and I’m so relieved that My Brilliant Friend didn’t disappoint.
We complain about a lack of new Irish music on the radio but when you have John Barker’s Totally Irish (98fm), Michael Carr’s Select Irish (96fm), and Peter Curtin’s Groovers Corner, along with discussions from podcasts No Encore and Nialler9, we’re actually very well served.
I was watching Ruth Negga as Hamlet one Saturday night while Mitski was playing across town at the Tivoli, so I can’t complain too much. But Be the Cowboy is one of the albums of the year and by all accounts, it was a powerful, heady performance from someone who’s only going to get bigger. Fingers crossed she’ll be back in 2019.
I still haven’t been able to press play on Frightened Rabbit since the death of frontman Scott Hutchison in May. He was so talented and soundtracked so many people’s life highlights and lowest nights. It’s such a loss in so many sad ways.
Music-wise, world domination for Fontaines DC after they release their debut album, and finally getting to see Charli XCX at Primavera Sound in Barcelona.
Re books, the debut essay collection from Sinead Gleeson, Constellations, and the new novel from Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier.
Colette Sheridan
The stage adaptation of Louise O’Neill’s novel, Asking For It, at the Everyman, was powerful and topical, dealing with rape culture and society’s propensity for victim-blaming. Nearly three hours long, it never flagged in its depiction of a young woman devastated by sexual violence.
Poet, Matthew Sweeney, who died from motor neurone disease in August 2018, bravely read from his new collection, My Life As a Painter, in Cork’s Central Library in April, even though his voice was adversely affected by his illness. But he still had a spark and drew a large appreciative audience.
Ageing and dying were the big themes in New York-based artist, Philip Toledano’s exhibition at the Crawford. Entitled Maybe: Life & Love, it depicted the decline of the artist’s father from dementia using photography. There was also an exploration of potential scenarios of the artist’s own future, using prosthetics and visiting fortune tellers.
Edna O’Brien’s son, the writer Carlo Gebler, who was put under the spotlight at a UCC School of English event about literary offspring, spoke to me about his emotionally abusive and apparently joyless father, Ernest Gebler. O’Brien, in contrast, was described by her son as a fun parent and a source of treats.
Conal Creedon’s recently published novel is a beguiling tale of a tragic Christian Brother who forsook a potential love affair for the cloth, having met a young nun the night Dana won the Eurovision.
Watching The Camino Voyage, an Irish documentary about four men doing the Spanish pilgrimage by sea in a naomhóg (a Kerry Currach), was almost a spiritual experience.
It was the real deal for the poetic and musical oarsmen that included Glen Hansard, Brendan Begley and Danny Sheehy (who later died in a tragic accident at sea in 2017.) Making the documentary, over four years, was an odyssey in itself. Sheehy summed up the great feat when he said: “This voyage took sweat, blood and blisters to complete while deepening and renewing friendships, creativity and spirituality in the process.”
Never has getting ‘the shift’ taken so long and involved so much embarrassment as it did in The Young Offenders, the hilarious coming-of-age TV comedy series, shot in Cork, complete with scenes such as the two young fellas diving from the ‘Shaky Bridge’ to impress the girls.
The indefatigable writers, Danielle McLaughlin and Madeleine D’Arcy, continue to host the popular Fiction at the Friary on the last Sunday of the month. It’s a great support for up-and-coming writers and an opportunity to attend readings by newly published and established authors.
I’d have liked to have gone to see the band, Microdisney, who re-formed for a night at the National Concert Hall. They’re playing Cyprus Avenue in Cork in February and I’ve probably missed the boat again, not being great at planning ahead things to do and see. It’s a Cork thing.
The fuss over the word ‘faggot’ in Fairytale of New York.
For goodness sake, it’s not meant as a gay slur but rather, a waster, in the old Irish meaning of the derogatory term. It’s all about context and the era in which the wonderful Shane MacGowan song was written.
You don’t see women getting into a lather about the use of the word ‘slut’ in the lyrics. Spare us from the easily offended.
Kevin Barry has a new novel due out in July 2019. Night Boat to Tangier is described as a novel “drenched in sex and death and narcotics, in sudden violence and old magic”.
I’m also looking forward to The Goldfinch, a film adaptation of the novel by the same name by Donna Tartt. The film, starring Nicole Kidman, is to be released in October 2019. It’s directed by Cork-born John Crowley.
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