General

Sustainability, it’s everywhere. You can’t turn a corner, turn on the radio or log onto Twitter without getting some slice of either hopeless doomsdayism or deluded optimism on the subject. It’s become a monster, malevolent or benevolent who can tell. And a bit like Homer and his ‘’the internet, is that thing still around? ‘’… Read more »

No more than yourself, or anybody in fact that you care to mention, I have tried to kick off the New Year by establishing some wholesome habits. One of these, and probably the only one that will endure tbh, is walking the banks of the Grand Canal which flows east/west about two miles from my… Read more »

I did a project recently in the location depicted in the attached photographs. It looks like a typical suburban housing estate ‘streetscape’, just like the thousands more of its ilk elsewhere in south Dublin and dotted across the country. Typical, standard, cookie cutter stuff. The development contains multiple dwelling types – terraced houses, apartments, semi… Read more »

The warnings were there, dwindling shelves with no sign of replenishment. That’s never a good sign. We had our suspicions and then this week the official sign went up to confirm it. As of this Bank Holiday weekend Ballybrittas Post Office and its associated small grocery and newsagent Murphy’s will be no more. I will… Read more »

In the immortal words of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, what the world needs now is love, sweet love. Ain’t that the truth? But what the world also needs now, to the same magnitude, is trees, sweet trees. More trees and less eejits. The requirements of our planet right now can be neatly summarised in… Read more »

It all started with the brilliant Sunday night set on the main stage at All Together Now from Fleet Foxes. I have been meaning for a while to catch up with their current album ‘Crack-Up’. So, they come out and play a load of tunes that I know from their first two records, and they… Read more »

I see a feature in the Sunday Independent magazine there last week about how more and more ‘creatives’ are eschewing Dublin and choosing to live in what the magazine chooses to call ‘rural Ireland’. Except in this instance what the magazine really means by ‘rural Ireland’ is the same as it always means by ‘rural… Read more »

In the fullness of time, Big Little Lies will come to be regarded as one of the preeminent pieces of art of this time. It is set in present day Monterey California and primarily concerns the lives of four emotionally troubled women Madeline, Renata, Jane and Celeste. In the western slice of the geoid we… Read more »

The notion of borrowed landscape is a concept with which you become fairly familiar in this line of work. The phrase itself should be self-explanatory; what is visible beyond the confines of a garden or space has a huge bearing on the character of a place. In some instances, it may be positive and needs… Read more »