Joe Horgan

Ireland

Writer at The Irish Post

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Articles

The island of strangers - we once were them, now we watch on as they're blamed for everything

1 week ago | irishpost.com | Joe Horgan

WE ARE in a time where we are told that what concerns most people is migration. Not just here in Ireland, but across Europe, across the world maybe. Of course, when we say it is what concerns them what we really mean is that most people are worried about it, feel hostile to it, want, in fact, the immigrants to stop arriving in their country. Here in Ireland it takes the casual, but sinister, refrain of people referring to ‘one of our own’.
The strength and strangeness of Irish smallness

2 weeks ago | irishpost.com | Joe Horgan

ONE of the things about Ireland, or at least rural Ireland, and we still have one of the highest rural populations in Europe, is just how small it is. It is hard to convey this. It is hard to translate this into a form of clarity. I’m still struck, after over twenty-six years living here, by this very thing. Those of us who grew up Irish in the big Irish communities of the UK mainly had parents from rural backgrounds though we ourselves mainly grew up in the big, old cities, of Britain.
Last orders for Irish pubs?

3 weeks ago | irishpost.com | Joe Horgan

WHAT’S happening to the pub? Over the last twenty years more than 2,000 pubs have closed. Here in Ireland. A country so synonymous with pub culture that we exported the very idea of an ‘Irish’ pub across the globe. And these bare statistics are a very real thing. From where I’m writing this right now a two-minute drive in opposite directions would once have taken me to a choice of three rural pubs. There’s now one. Pubs in Ireland are closing and that is a big change in the very nature of Irish life.
Home for the summer, not just a holiday

1 month ago | irishpost.com | Joe Horgan

IF WE had the summers they have elsewhere, the consistent, reliable sun and heat, what would our coastline look like? Would the countless golden beaches of Donegal be a parade of high-rise hotels? Would the broad strands of Cork and Kerry be offering an all-day English breakfast? Did our broken weather save us? The summers of childhood are sun dappled and unending but even a distorted recalling of those childhood Augusts in Ireland fails to recreate an endless sun.
Citizen journalism is pseudo journalist

1 month ago | irishpost.com | Joe Horgan

I’M NOT a journalist. I think I could say I’m a columnist and I think I could say I’m a writer on account of a few published books. But I’m not a journalist. I wish I was but I never trained as one and I never studied as one and I’ve never really worked as one. It would be dishonest of me to claim I was one and it would be a disservice to the many people who actually have trained, studied, or worked as journalists for me to claim that moniker.
| The Irish Post

1 month ago | irishpost.com | Joe Horgan

SHE was originally from a country in Africa but the pride with which she spoke when talking about her Irish passport was something to behold. She’d come here through the asylum process but the only details of her background I was really aware of were the death of a brother in some terrible act of violence.
Literary landscapes: Seeing Ireland through its writers

2 months ago | irishpost.com | Joe Horgan

I SPENT a couple of lovely days in the city of Galway recently and while I was there I read a book that was set in Galway and I can only say it made it all the more alive. Not, of course, that Galway needs more life put into it. It got me thinking, though, that visitors to Ireland in the coming months could do a lot worse than see how a work of literature opens a place up. There are guide books, yes, and they’ll give you handy information.
Immigration isn’t the problem - inequality is

2 months ago | irishpost.com | Joe Horgan

THERE’S an awful lot of rhetoric about immigration these days, isn’t there? There’s a host of politicians on the right presenting it as the ‘problem’ of our times. A parade of billionaires and millionaires directing people not to examine inequality or extreme wealth or basic fairness but to examine the immigrant. Do not, whatever you do, question those who have the most.
Did we lose our Irish, or did we willingly give it up?

Feb 28, 2025 | irishpost.com | Joe Horgan

DO you have the cúpla focal? To be honest isn’t that just what the vast majority of us have? Just a few scattered words of Irish. A few halting sentences. The Irish language was back in the headlines recently over the bizarre controversy as to whether the Taoiseach had or had not called Mary Lou McDonald a liar when he spoke in the Dáil in Irish. It is nothing but ironic that the controversy about the language centres around nobody being sure what the words he spoke meant.
Raised in England, rooted in Ireland

Feb 26, 2025 | irishpost.com | Joe Horgan

Straddling two cultures — an Irish childhood lived in the shadow of English floodlights and Irish memoriesIT WAS in this fallow part of the year when we’d start looking forward to St. Patrick’s Day. People can knock it all they like but the day was sacrosanct to us. It was an essential day in our calendar. A day when we really asserted who we were. The Holy Day of Obliteration. My brother would invariably say, don’t start too early, wait for me to finish work.