Mick Rooney | Journalist & Broadcaster

Ireland was an experience for me three years on. Everything changed for me from my last visit. And, yet, in some ways nothing changed at all. My good friend, Irish musician John Buckley McQuaid, reminded me during my trip home to Ireland of a Joycean quote – to paraphrase – you have to leave to be able to stay. And that is how I felt over the past two weeks in Ireland – a native, and yet an exile by choice. I can’t speak for others. I’m a Dubliner, so that’s my spot – my original home. Others from rural parts of Ireland may have a different opinion and experience living abroad for years. More than ten years in the Netherlands and three years away without a visit home due to the pandemic; I’m never sure where the beginning and ending are of the journey. But sometimes, that’s the way journeys are – without clear beginnings and endings. Nothing is ever fixed and finite. We just move and time passes. I’m two Fridays in Ireland and the Late, Late Show is forgotten about. We’re too busy in t...

  On August 14 th  2019, my beloved and I travelled to Ireland for a week-long trip. As we like it, a no-fuss trip and time out with Irish family and friends. Like the rest of the world, we had no clue what was coming beyond a simple holiday, likely followed by another similar trip by Spring/Easter 2020.   When I hugged my dad in James’ Hospital that last visit, kissed his forehead, touched his skin, felt his warm hands, and him in the throes of increasingly advanced Parkinson’s; I had no idea of what was next. Mam was up the walls with doctors and nurses and careworkers and trying to get dad a place in a permanent nursing home.   When I hugged mam a week later in the hallway of our family home on the morning of August 21 st , after we packed suitcases into our rental car in the driveway and drove away to the airport, I’d also no clue that would be the last hug for three years.   We were planning a Dutch Christmas at our home in the Netherlands, and ...

  It's 1988. I've just finished an apprenticeship with AnCo for a Mechanical and Electrical certification. I'm a roller and mover at that time and the world is now my oyster. I get an interview with a company called Kish Glass off the Belgard Road in Dublin. I nail the interview. The gentleman running the company is impressed. We're joking and smiling at the end of the interview. ''You're my last interviewee this week and you have impressed me the most of all ten people I've talked to this week.'' Great. Job done and sealed. We shake hands and talk about football as we part and I go down the stairs leaving him in his office to a small unmanned reception area. He'll talk to me Monday on terms and we are good to go. I pull the door to head out but it is locked. I look for a button buzzer, but nothing. I had to 'buzz in' to get access on an intercom when I arrived. ''Shit,'' I think. I loiter for a bit and hope so...

It remains uncertain when exactly peace talks will commence on the Belarus border between Ukraine and Russia, but make no mistake, while Ukraine resists, Russia continues to build up its forces and equipment around many cities. And whether it will ever happen. Putin isn't going to send his officials in to negotiate unless he believes he has the strongest hand. And having the strongest hand means holding several of the largest cities. He has, as of yet, not unleashed his greatest firepower for both an air and ground assault. While the step up in international sanctions will bite, be assured, this despot would have considered the implications weeks and months ago. The actual planning for this action didn't start a few weeks or months ago; it's been in the making since 2013. The course of history is defined by when we start to pay attention and when we lose it – when we act or react. There’s no physical battlefield for that place. Currently, mass media do what they always do: ...

  It’s surreal. I’m on the way to Dublin Port to get a ferry to Holyhead and on to London. Dad and I say little on the journey from Walkinstown in south Dublin to the boat. It’s raining lightly and we’re both a bit lost in our thoughts in the car. The two clowns together again, but this time the journey isn’t a holiday. There is no easy home-coming. There’s no trip to see the Space Shuttle or Chocolate Sundaes. There’s no fucking ice cream on this trip. I’m looking at the reflection of the Dublin City lights on the windscreen of dad’s car, a wine-coloured Volkswagen Golf. But I also see in those reflections the image of my mother, crying in the hallway, and then at the door as dad reverses out of the driveway. She waves goodbye in the darkness, and I am gone. ‘’Take this,’’ dad says. He shoves an old brown wallet into my hand. It’s worn at the edges, but it has lasted time itself. You’ll need this for all the money you’ll earn in London. I recognised it. ‘’Your mam bought me ...

  JUNE 27th, FLORIDA, 1982 . Dad was downstairs in the hotel lobby figuring out the plans for the day with ‘American Joe’, our resort travel guide. ‘American Joe’ had taken us from Miami Airport to the hotel on Collins Avenue a few days earlier for our two-week trip to Florida. The relationship between Joe and dad was becoming increasingly more fractured and less useful. He couldn’t tell you where the ice vending machine was in the hotel, but he sure as hell knew the location of the best casinos, pancake diners, and strip-joints on Collins Avenue. Organisations of day-trips were about shoving brochures in your hand and vaguely pointing out the window and down the road to a far and distant planet. His grasp of English ran to less than a dozen words. I was upstairs with the TV on and running out to the balcony waiting to see the Space Shuttle Columbia in the sky after take-off. Less than one minute after take-off, there she was, right there in front of me – like in real life, not the...

This came from an archive piece from RTE TV (1971-Ireland). It's probably better to view the archive piece before reading this for context. The original RTE archive I can understand the arguments on both sides. I'll digress, if I may. Back in the mid-1980s, I worked for Premier Dairies in Rathfarnham. Places like Old Bawn, Springfield and the new Jobstown were our delivery areas (the odd local school and shops). Barely off the Tallaght by-pass, going up into those new estates was like visiting a mountaintop, a last outpost of civilisation. Every month we watched new housing estates being built - hundreds of houses, then thousands - the isolation and lack of very basic amenities for the communities was utterly shocking considering the massive building expansion. It was a stark contrast for many young parents who had grown up close to the inner city, used to local amenities on their doorsteps. In hindsight, so many of those new housing developments were sold/rented by the counc...

FECKIN' NUNS Nuns! Feckin' nuns... they were everywhere when we were kids. You went into 'town' with your mother... feckin' nuns on the bus in, nuns in the park, nuns at school ... and waltzing around the streets when you got there in their long black and white flowing frocks like swans. Their necks primed and up straight, listening and waiting to prey upon us. Stephen's Green and Trinity College... oh... they liked walking around the big snazzy places. *** I was three before I found out I didn't live in feckin' Rome or the Vatican. I was convinced me dad wasn't me da and I was a religious love-child of some sort. It wasn't the Garda we were afraid of in the streets in Dublin City... it was the nuns! ON A HOT DAY IN DUBLIN "Ma... can we get an ice cream? I'm hungry and hot." "Jesus, Holy Mary and Joseph... will you keep your voice down, child!" "Why?" "Did you not see two nuns walking in front of us? What w...