Rosita Boland

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Rosita Boland

“We had a client who had bought a €20,000 camera for a trip to Africa, but she didn’t know how to use the camera, so she just used her iPhone instead,” Siobhan Byrne says. Byrne is the founder of Adams and Butler, a luxury travel agency based in Dublin. She is telling this story about the client who bought an expensive camera that remained unused for an expensive trip to illustrate the kind of money people who go on their trips have.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Rosita Boland

When a person goes missing in Ireland, it’s become routine to see many posters of that person displayed within the area where they were last seen. That’s not the case with Kerry farmer Michael Gaine (56), who was last seen on March 20th; a disappearance described at the time by all who knew him as completely out of character. I didn’t see a single poster with his image anywhere in Kenmare this week; the town closest to the 400-hectare (1,000-acre) property he farmed a few kilometres away.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Rosita Boland

The first time I really became aware of the New Yorker magazine was back in 2007, when many things in our lives were still analogue. I was staying in a cabin amid the humid jungle at Palenque in Mexico, where there are famous Mayan ruins. The cabin next to mine was occupied by a retired couple of academics who drove from Boston to Mexico each year, and wintered there, while working with a local NGO to help provide some basic engineering training. I met Tess first, in the pool.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Rosita Boland

Acknowledgments in books tell their own backstories of influence and support: the necessary people in an author’s life who help underpin the scaffolding involved in constructing a book. Throughout her career, Sally Rooney has acknowledged the editorial advice she has received from a long-time friend, John Patrick McHugh.

2 months ago | irishtimes.com | Rosita Boland

“They were very close friends. They grew up beside each other in Foxrock. Their mothers were very close friends,” Sarah Jane Scaife says over a coffee in the Abbey Theatre’s foyer. The “they” she’s referring to are Samuel Beckett, Ireland’s most famous playwright, and Mary Manning, one far fewer people will have heard of. Her play Youth’s the Season–?, which she wrote in 1931, opens at the Abbey today, with Scaife directing.