Said the Dead is a book that was born in the archive. It grew from hundreds of hours spent studying a series of casebooks that had been rescued from the cellars of a derelict hospital nearby. By the time I happened to find these books in the archive, they were over a century old and incredibly fragile, their pages brittle and crumbling – but inside, another world was alive. I began with casebooks from the 1890s and slowly read my way towards the 1920s. Many of the books were printed with the name of the institution, ‘Cork District Lunatic Asylum’, a title I could never get used to, always flinching at the word ‘lunatic’, so abrasive to the …
Category: Non-fiction
By Ciarán Murphy My experience of hurling as a young boy was not too uncommon. I loved it, I loved watching it, the best players in the country were heroes to …
During the Covid lockdowns I took to walking along the Grand Canal in Dublin, from Portobello to down as far as the docklands, within my 5km restrictions. I became fascinated …
Books for Business and Life… Given his constant presence in the upper echelons of the Irish podcast chart, it is no surprise that demand for Dragon’s Den star Steven Bartlett’s …
Globally, water bodies and our ocean are the most degraded ecosystems in the world – they hold all of who are: Our waste, our memories, our history, our ancestry, our …
Here at Dubray we have been spending Pride month celebrating all the LGBTQ+ authors whose books we carry, and all the books we have with queer characters. We believe it …
Give yourself good things. Why is it that you so readily chat shit to yourself, about yourself? You run on empty. You expect so much and give little in return. …
A few years ago, I was researching an article about mother-and-baby institutions in Ireland for my job at the BBC and had gotten stuck. The assignment felt like wading through …
#ReadIrishWomenChallenge22 #RIWC22 It’s April so I’m back once again with the Read Irish Women Challenge – the month where we celebrate outstanding books by Irish women. Starting on April 1st, …
As a journalist, sometimes you find a story and sometimes one comes to you. The latter was what I experienced in August 2018, when I was first contacted through Facebook …
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