As you may have guessed, I'm a bit of a fan of Fintan O'Toole. He spoke to The Irish Times here inside the Dublin offices which included some nice panoramic shots of the office, his books, workstation and him typing. Call me a stalking, but I thought these inside glimpses were fascinating. You can see what he's reading, how he organises his affairs, and that he's an old-timer - as per his one-finger-stab-the-keyboard typing style!
You can see the original footage and accompanying article here and here. He made two especially interesting remarks. One:
"And what we know in Ireland is, unless something is being driven very very clearly, what happens is it goes back to the default mechanism in Ireland which is patronage, which is cronyism, machine politics. Which is the way these things get done."Two:
"Artists question, transform, challenge, disturb, mock, make strange. A thriving artistic scene enhances a place mostly by enriching its spiritual and intellectual life."
To see a full selection of screengrabs, click the read more button. Also here's a list of some of the blog posts I've written which have included Fintan O'Toole. On Ireland's dark history here. On Arthur Griffiths, founder of Sinn Fein, here. On the Good Friday Agreement here. On the hyper-inflation of language and emotion, here. On the "folly of sectarian solutions", click here. On the impropriety of the Mandela-McGuiness/Adams comparison, see here. On incinerating Ireland's censorship board, see here. His brief note on Conor Cruise O'Brien here. On Irish identity as not being about being not-British, see here. More on Irish identity here.
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