Glasfryn Project

Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is haunting the last two weeks of this pregnancy, as is the reporting of the 2011 Irish census.

My entry to the largest maternity hospital in Dublin, and one of the busiest in Europe (it is nicknamed ‘The Baby Factory’) followed the publication of the final Mahon Tribunal Report on the 22nd March, 2012. For those possibly uninitiated to Irish politics, its official subtitle is The Tribunal of Inquiry Into Certain Planning Matters and Payments. Established by Dáil Éireann in 1997 to investigate allegations of corrupt payments to politicians regarding planning permissions and land rezoning during the 1990s in Co Dublin, it is named after its last chairman Justice Mahon.

The findings of this public inquiry were reported baldly by the headline of the Irish Times on the 23rd March- ‘Corruption and abuse of power “endemic in politics’’.

TO READ THIS ARTICLE CLICK HERE: Working Class Heroes and Daydream Nation

Nerys Williams, originally from Pen-y-Bont, Carmarthen in West Wales, published her first collection of poetry Sound Archive (2011) with Seren. Sound Archive was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis First Volume/ Forward Prize and the Michael Murphy Award. Nerys is a native Welsh speaker and before entering academia had worked at BBC Wales and as a care assistant on psychiatric wards. She was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar’s Award at UC Berkeley in 2007.

A winner of the most recent Poetry Ireland Ted McNulty Poetry Prize, she lectures in American Literature at University College, Dublin. She has published poems, critical essays widely and is the author of A Guide to Contemporary Poetry (2011) as well as study of contemporary American poetry, Reading Error: The Lyric and Contemporary Poetry (2007). She is currently working on a second volume of poetry which sets up a sequence of exchanges between the 1939 San Francisco Exhibition, Ireland and Wales.

Websites:

http://www.ucd.ie/research/people/englishdramafilm/drnerysowenwilliams/

http://melopoeia.blogspot.com/

View all: Issue 3, Junction Box | Posted on 31 May 2012 |