Patrick Freyne

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Patrick Freyne

“On which dating show did your parents meet?” is a classic icebreaker at dinner parties here in the year 2025. Ninety per cent of the population are now hunks. It’s an absolute hunkfestation – no uggos allowed – here in the latter days of man, where global warming plus rising sea levels have rendered everywhere a beach and we wear swimwear 24 hours a day. Furthermore, tired out from all the “politics”, all ideologies are now dating-show related.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Patrick Freyne

Thirty-year-old Zuha was a recently graduated lawyer when the Sudanese war broke out in 2023. Until then, she says, “life was good”. For her the war began as a news report and then became distant gunfire and smoke. Eventually, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one side in the conflict, reached her neighbourhood in El Geneina and she and her family began a seemingly endless march from one area to another to avoid harm.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Patrick Freyne

Recently, I was in east Chad, where most of the people I met had seen loved ones murdered or had been raped or had been shot or saw bodies piled along the road from el-Geneina to Adre on the border with Sudan. I was travelling with Irish Times photographer Chris Maddaloni and we were visiting refugee camps for Sudanese refugees. The week we flew into the capital, N’Djamena, Gen Yasir Al-Atta from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) declared the airport “a legitimate target”.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Patrick Freyne

Fredric Jameson said, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” And it’s easier for Disney to imagine a worker’s critique of power set in the Star Wars universe than on the slightly shabbier real planet where we actually live. In Andor (Disney+) the series’ creator, Tony Gilroy, tells a complicated story about the dehumanising, creaking bureaucracy of totalitarianism and the flawed and ordinary humans who work within it.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Patrick Freyne

In the Aboutengue refugee camp in Chad, an hour’s drive from the border with Sudan, six women sit in the shade of a sycamore fig tree and tell us about the war. It’s very hot. Most of the people in the camp are women and children. The government and the aid agencies want to move the refugees in Adre, a huge unofficial camps on the Sudanese border, to more organised camps such as this one. This is largely because of the security issues that arise from having so many people on the border.