‘Animals are so straightforward. They will love unconditionally. We almost don’t deserve them’
I moved into charity work, first at Barretstown and then with the DSPCA, after the crash pushed me out of architecture
Me, Myself and Ireland
A series of articles exploring people's relationship with Ireland
Designer Helen James: I was teased at school about being English, a Protestant. There was always something of the ‘other’ about me
Designer Helen James on returning to Dublin from New York, the ‘gentler, lovelier pace’ here, and the traditions of Christmas
Author Maggie O’Farrell: I had a teacher at school who took the register, called my name and said to me, ‘Are your family in the IRA?’
The novelist Maggie O’Farrell on leaving Ireland, growing up in Britain, life as a child with a stammer and her new book
Blindboy: ‘I left my first day of school feeling great shame. The pain of that still rises up in me’
The Limerick-based podcaster and author on his school trauma, adult autism diagnosis and unconventional mother
Nell Mescal: “Am I a manifester? In my journal I’m writing, ‘I am headlining Croke Park’”
Singer-songwriter Nell Mescal from Maynooth on overcoming scoliosis surgery, dropping out of school before her Leaving Cert and her dream of headlining Croke Park
Poet Paul Muldoon: ‘My dad, a market gardener, was a guy who could barely write his own name’
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, academic and musician Paul Muldoon on growing up in a nationalist family in Co Armagh, life in Belfast during the Troubles and moving to the US
Paul Noonan of Bell X1: ‘I love living in Ireland but how we lean in to booze culture pisses me off’
Noonan is a songwriter, musician and lead singer of Bell X1 and HousePlants
The Gloaming’s Iarla Ó Lionaird: ‘My mother would keep each of her children home from school one day a week so she could get to know us’
Iarla Ó Lionaird, a sean-nós singer, on the romanticism of rural life, growing up in a big family and traditional music
Michelin-star chef JP McMahon: We’re looking at Irish food in a new way and we’re very much part of the Nordic food movement
JP McMahon is a Michelin-starred chef, restaurateur and author. He lives and works in Galway
‘The Bean an Tí looked shocked to see a Chinese girl speaking Irish’
Eva Pau, commercial director of family business Asia Market, on being immersed in Irish culture from an early age
‘I got 550 points in my Leaving Cert. I’ve always had this feeling that I had a purpose in life’
The second-year law student at University of Galway on discrimination she has faced as a Traveller and how education became her refuge
Moving to Sligo, 1987: ‘I soon realised I’d left a conservative country for an ultraconservative one’
Writer Cauvery Madhavan arrived in Ireland with a ‘suitcase full of sin’ – a stockpile of condoms
Neil Jordan: We lived in an Ireland that emanated from the brain of one paranoid individual
The Ireland of film-maker and author Neil Jordan’s youth was like ‘living in a fantastical universe that didn’t make any logical sense’
Patrick Kielty: ‘It’s tricky to get through Heathrow, called Paddy, with a balaclava in your bag’
The presenter of RTÉ's The Late Late Show on his relationship with Ireland
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