The Author, Séamas O'Reilly

@seamas.bsky.social

33558 Followers 2308 Following

Author, very professional. Buy my debut novel PRESTIGE DRAMA at https://geni.us/Prestige_Drama. Get my extremely good memoir at www.mammybook.com

Such gatherings were, however, rare. I grew up in the open countryside of the Derry/Donegal border and had few people – let alone children my own age – anywhere near us. We weren’t in a village or even a loosely coherent townland. There was no church or pub or GAA club, no post office or parish hall. Just a dozen-or-so properties, most of them farms, spread across a sprawling five-mile patchwork of fields that meandered back and forth across a border to which nobody paid much attention.
Tweet from Spectator journalist James Heale: Told Tory MPs have a new nickname for Burnham: "Eyelashes"
ADVERTISEMENT FOR MYSELF AND PATRICK FREYNE'S SHOWDOWN AT THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL, highlighting that it is on Friday 21st August 2026 at 18.15, overlaid with my dear close personal friend Patrick's comment "I'm not saying this Edinburgh festival event with my literary foe is going to be a cage match but...". Patrick looks windswept and handsome, albeit clasping a hand to his head in the manner of someone who's seen a better, more handsome author, summit the turnbuckle for a devastating moonsault. I look beautiful, stately and serene, caught in a poignant reverie of that one time I smashed Patrick's face in with a chair at the Dalkey Book Festival
The greatest scene in Come Dine With Me history, when Peter decries Jane and her "sad little life"
Social media bans are popular because they seem pleasingly dramatic to those of us who have neuroses about our own screen time, and wish to launder them as concerns for children’s safety. They’re also a “free hit”, since the adult population are slow to be moved by the harms such bans might cause children, and governments care even less since they exclusively affect people who can neither vote nor put money in their coffers. A serious approach to mitigating online harms is possible. Such measures are, in fact, already enshrined in laws we refuse to enact. We could hold tech companies materially responsible for the bile and misinformation they spread. We could institute moderation and controls, with severe legal and financial penalties, for platforms such as X that profit from the spread of child abuse imagery and racial hatred. We could improve media literacy by teaching our children how to spot slop, misinformation and spam in the wild, perhaps teaching ourselves a little about that task in the process.
Lukaku, in Belgium's Magritte inspired away kit, taunting the most American fans ever devised, decked out in stars and stripes
Tweet by Aaron Rupar of Trump briefing the White House press corps: rump on Balogun: "I saw the play, and I'm a person that loves sports ... that wasn't a foul. That wasn't even an infraction ... this referee, who is a little bit suspect if you check his past. He made a call that nobody could believe ... he's our best player, or one of our best players. And he gave him a red card. I didn't know what that meant ... yes, I asked for a review by FIFA."
Screenshot from Twitter of Ted Cruz addressing Trump in the Oval Office. Cruz: On behalf of all Americans, thank you for getting rid of that ridiculous red card. President Trump: That was interesting. Cruz: It was spectacular. There was a reason the FIFA trophy sat here for as long as it did
A tweet by THE Sepp Blatter: Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls. They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies. If a U.S. President intervenes with the FIFA President - and a player is suddenly cleared before a World Cup knockout match - the question is unavoidable: Quo vadis, FIFA? Football must never become a playground for political power. #FIFA #WorldCup #GianniInfantino #DonaldTrump
My first sign that these stickers might not be all they’re promised was when I tried to open one of the bloody things. Peeling each from its backing becomes a deadening grind in which you massage the edges of a micron-thin piece of paper like a safe-cracker probing for weak spots. I was obsessed with football sticker books as a kid and don’t remember them being sealed together with the chemical bond of a hydrogen atom. Granted, my son does it with much less fuss, because he has the small, dainty hands of a porcelain doll, but even he has given up on several occasions, leaving a small, sad pile of dog-eared men in the corner of our sittingroom.
I’ve tried to get him to watch football with me, but boredom usually sets in within minutes. I have managed to get him interested in five-minute highlights of games, compressing each roomy 90 minutes into a wall-to-wall collation of fouls, goals and screaming. “Highlights are better,” he tells me, and I inwardly cheer as I watch him reach for a book or tablet after three minutes, rather than the usual 30 seconds. As a player, he’s less eager still. I used to bring him to a weekly toddler-ball club in our local park, during which I discovered just how good a three-year-old could be at football. Sadly, that three-year-old was named Jamie, and he spent most of his time dribbling rings around my son, who mostly practised falling over. When he professed a preference to spend his Saturday mornings playing chess or drawing illustrations for his home-made comics, I didn’t mind very much.
Charlotnafc official site headline: Alan Curbishley named Head of Artifical Intelligence, under an impossibly charming photo of the puppy-faced former manager smiling at a desk with a Charlton-sticker-bedecked laptop.
Roisin Murphy's tour schedule showing a perfect absence of Upcoming Concerts: a void, a blank, an arid wasteland of shows, perhaps because her existing fanbase was 80% queer people, and one would have to presume 99% queer friendly.
Truth social post by Donald Trump: Keir Starmer will resign as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He failed badly on two very important subjects- IMMIGRATION AND ENERGY (OPEN NORTH SEA PIL!). I wish him well! President DJT
Patricia later told me she did occasionally diverge from fulsome support, as when, two babies later, she took the caffein ated nausea call and betrayed her shock with an exclamation of ‘Jesus Christ, Sheila’, which stung my mother slightly. ‘Oh, I thought you’d be pleased,’ she said. ‘You’re always pleased when I’m pregnant.’ ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Patricia shot back, ‘please don’t think you have to keep doing it to make me happy.’ Undeterred, my mother went on to have three more chil dren, the first of whom was me
Tweet from Catholic Arena saying: In 2018, most Irish young people voted for abortion because they were told it would create a bold new Ireland where all their dreams would come true Now, most of them can't afford to buy a house
Hollywood Reporter headline about "a Peter Thiel-backed tribunal putting journalists on trial" with a stock image of the word Guilty rendered on a computer keyboard.
Some prefer to step two degrees away from the above conclusion, blaming the violence not on one discrete crime, but rather on long-simmering discontent about “unfettered immigration”, to use the words offered by loyalist MP Jim Allister, in the wake of last year’s Ballymena riots. Such riots are appalling, the argument goes, but their anger reflects a legitimate concern; that immigration has simply gone too far. Again, we risk demeaning ourselves by pointing out that rates of migration into Northern Ireland have never been connected to any rise in crime, and represent a tremendous benefit to the economy, from workers in hospitality and agri-business sectors to manufacturing and academia. Migrants are most beneficial in the health and care sectors, with 22 per cent of carers in the state coming from outside the UK and Ireland, without whom Tracey Reid, chief executive of the Northern Ireland Social Care Council, says the sector “could not survive”. Such statistics are, of course, broadly similar throughout the UK and Ireland, and were regarded as truisms until it became seemingly gauche for any prominent newspaper or politician to repeat them, in favour of contorting gymnastically to flatter the perceptions and prejudices of those who just hate migrants for entirely racist reasons. No matter how much they contribute to society, and no matter how few of them there are.
Last July, the family of Jessy Clark, a nine-year-old boy with multiple serious disabilities, were allocated a newbuild bungalow in the Ballycraigy estate in Antrim town. The home was purpose-built to provide for Jessy’s medical needs, allowing him the facility to bathe and use his wheelchair, freedoms he’d been denied in the hospital bed he’d been living in for years. Shortly before the family were due to move in, the house was attacked with bricks and paint bombs. Soon its boarded-up windows featured graffiti of crosshairs, and slogans declared that all such housing was for “locals only”. The LVF-affiliated group responsible for this were implicated in a several other attacks in the area, driving eight African families out of their homes in the few weeks previous. Deducing this took little by way of detective work, since the group posted laminated signs around the area declaring “No Undesirables… No Multiculturalism” and warnings to “keyboard warriors” that their home might be next.
When, this week, the Telegraph printed a rabidly scaremongering report that “White British people will be a minority in 40 years”, they clarified this cohort as “the white British share of the population — defined as people who do not have an immigrant parent”. Leaving aside how garbled that formulation is — there are millions of non-white Brits who meet that definition perfectly — it carried with it a parallel consequence. I myself do not have an immigrant parent. In fact, every single pale and freckled ancestor of mine since 1800, Irish farmers to a soul, was born and raised in something called the United Kingdom. This is true for a large number of Irish people in the North. And since the late Prince Philip was himself a Greek immigrant, it gives me great pleasure to point out that they’d settled on a definition of ‘White British’ which includes Gerry Adams but excludes King Charles III.
adorable nerd auteur Guillermo del Toro doing a BFI vid on breaking into the industry, in which he appears to be sitting in the selfsame worn office chair and placid blue background utilised on Channel 4 daytime lexi-quiz Countdown
A photo of me - looking quite delish if I may say so myself - headed with the Sunday World's new CRIMEWORLD branding and typography.
We might also consider what this means for the millions of cis women who do not fit the standard, sexist notion of “femininity” which logic dictates they must be checked against to enforce this ruling. Too tall, perhaps, too strong-jawed, or short-haired — anything that one patron, one witness, one supermarket or leisure centre security guard might consider cause to question their femininity. And how might they prove their “real” gender? How would you? Perhaps my conception of feminism has been mis-calibrated all this time, and true freedom for women is mandating that they carry their birth certificates around with them all day, so they can be checked by citizen genital inspectors, male and female, encouraged to presume you’re a predator first, and work backwards from there.
Is prune juice the juice removed from plums to turn them into prunes, or is it the juice further removed from prunes? [The Estate of TS Eliot declined to respond.]
An image of my, the author Séamas O'Reilly, atop a chyron which reads: Séamas O'Reilly AUTHOR/HAS TEN SIBLINGS
Me, the author Séamas O'Reilly, in between Muirean and Tommy from Ireland AM. Tommy is clutching a copy of my excellent book, Prestige Drama. Both seem frankly awed by my literary genius.
A little motion graphic for my excellent book Prestige Drama containing toothsome pullquotes on its jacket. 'A comedy about tragedy. Séamas O'Reilly has written a brutal, profound, and very funny novel' NINA STIBBE 'Sparkling with heartache and wit. I'm in love with every character in this novel' CAROLINE O'DONOGHUE 'Prestige Drama is bristlingly funny, richly humane . . . Séamas O'Reilly is a writer with a rare and vital comic gift' MARK O'CONNELL
BOOK SIGNING. SUNDAY 10TH MAY 3PM. LITTLE ACORNS BOOKSTORE, DERRY.
But to take the findings more seriously, it does present a striking question about how we, as a society, so often view parenthood as the summit of human satisfaction. I’d imagine there are many cultural factors, not to mention genetic ones, that drive humans towards viewing the rearing of children as a unique and sacred source of joy and meaning. To take those genetic factors first, it’s likely that humans come pre-installed with a specific subset of hormones geared toward making us think that having children is the most important, special, joyful and wonderful thing a human can do. To be honest, if we want every child brought into this world to be as loved and cherished as possible, such instinctual drivers are probably a good thing (to say nothing of the existential need to, you know, keep humanity alive). To put it another way: even if it’s not true that having children makes you happier, it’s still probably a net positive for humanity that as many parents as possible believe this to be so. Another reason I’m perfectly sanguine about these findings is that I feel it’s about time nonparents had a peer-reviewed paper they could shoot back with any time a friend or relative tells them they’re “missing out”. As a society, we’ve made progress in how we treat those who don’t have kids, whether that be through happenstance or choice. But even today, and for women especially, there still exist many pressures, stigmas and taboos around childlessness. (One might even observe that the term “childlessness” itself seems to imply that not having children is a more aberrant state of being than parenthood, but I digress.)
In fact, thinking of Taylor Swift as a ‘youth craze’ is a a misnomer. In 2023, Statista surveyed self-described American ‘Swifties’ and found that the largest share of her fans were, like Swift herself, Millennials. At number two, however, were Baby Boomers, followed by Gen X at number 3. So, yes, the kids do love Taylor Swift, it’s just that their parents and grandparents appear to love her even more.
As their excitement reached fever pitch, I continued driving into the ground a joke I’d been making throughout our journey there. Namely, my repeated insistence that the animals I was most looking forward to seeing were not those typically seen in zoos. “I think I read that they have some pigeons over there,” I said with fascinated solemnity, pointing in the exact opposite direction of all the signs blaring more exotic animals directly in front of us. This caused them both to hop on the spot in mock-anger, my daughter screaming in delighted disgust, my son pointing to the zoo map with angry jabs of his finger. “Ah,” I said, thanking him. “Yes, you’re right. Let’s head here instead – that’s where they keep their wasp.” I kept this up for, oh, three whole minutes before we found ourselves padding into the giraffe enclosure, where we were immediately struck dumb. The degree to which adults fetishise animals for children is odd, when you think about it for any length of time at all. In the first few years of life, it’s considered not just useful, but fully mandatory, that every single child must know their letters, their numbers, and then 6,000 facts about animals; the sounds they make, the food they eat, the habitats in which they live. If an alien were to visit an educational setting filled with three- to six-year-old earthlings, they would likely conclude that Earth’s three most prized professions were writer, mathematician, and zoologist.
Onion Statshot image asking respondents who their favourite Commedia dell'Arte character is. Every single option is 0% except "Don't know" which is 100%
Sometimes I’ve heard other parents say things like “We spent all this money on this present they begged us for and then all they want to do is play with the box.” I don’t have those kinds of children. Mine yearn for large, expensive heaps of plastic that emit as much sound and light as possible. My daughter tore through the wrapping on the largest present first – a Paw Patrol boat she had mentioned to us, oh, seven thousand times – and shrieked with capitalistic delight. Then came some books, a stamp-making kit and some cards, all discarded quickly so she could lift the two biggest items and bring them into the sittingroom to play with by herself. These were the aforementioned boat, and a karaoke microphone gifted by her aunt. (This features a light-up base designed to engender epilepsy in human beings, and transmits a child’s voice at ear-splitting volume, making it the sort of present you’d be forgiven for presuming you would only give a child if their parents had recently maimed your dog.)
The poster for Me, Myself And Mary, which shows awhole host of kaleidoscopic imagery that's very hard to describe but here's a fist. In foreground, we have my big worried head, festooned with the shoulder length red hair I had as a younger man. Around me are the 8th president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, dancing cola bottles, an anthropomorphic vial of ketamine, the tayto man, a leprechaun, some melting clocks, a Twitter symbol, some mushrooms, a St Bridget's cross, an absynthe fairy, some planets, a starfield, some pints, and a giant cosmic rainbow.
A still from Me, Myself & Mary, showing a kaleidoscopic vision of ketamine-induced mania, i which I - Séamas - am holding a tray of drinks surrounded by cosmic ephemora, planets, rainbows, mushrooms etc, standing on a rainbow, flanked by Mary McAleese and my boss's boss's boss's boss. There is a giant me - Séamas - standing behind me, with three eyes, backed by a rainbow, with his hands outstretched in puppeteer stance.
The phrase “cottage industry” is sometimes deployed for the type of TV show that clusters within a larger oeuvre. One might, for example, cite the current surge of travel shows about celebs going to Italy, which has so far seen Stanley Tucci, Gino D’Acampo, Francesco da Mosto, Clive Myrie, Giovanna Fletcher, Alex Polizzi – I’m not finished yet – Alan Carr and Amanda Holden, Andrew Graham-Dixon and James May all front programmes about Italy this decade alone. And then there are those individuals who have become not just a cottage industry but a genre unto themselves. In this bracket we would be forced to place Gordon Ramsay, whose new show, Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service (Channel 4, Monday), may seem strikingly familiar to fans of everything else he has ever done (one exception being the slightly more sedate travelogue he did with D’Acampo and Fred Sirieix, in which they travelled around, er, Italy).
He illuminates queasy splatters of food waste on every surface, plate and utensil, steps in horrid pools of stagnant, clumpy water and discovers an oven that has been left on overnight. This all serves as little more than a queasy starter, however, as we then follow Ramsay to the basement, where he swabs surfaces and machinery for bacteria. Firing up his electronic germ-counter while the music from Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell on the PlayStation 2 saws away in the background, he tells us that an unflushed toilet will register at 1,400 on its bacteria scale. When the screen bleeps back with 5,550, we delight at the knowledge that his shouting muscles are no doubt flexing as we speak.
Unlike Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg, Altman was not a fixture in the crossover sphere of famous tech billionaires until quite recently. His sudden appearance at the top of the world’s rollcall of fleece-wearing founders came around the end of 2022. To outsiders, it may have seemed like he’d parachuted in from nowhere, in the manner of a new cousin suddenly present in the ninth series of a flailing family sitcom, one whom you are bidden to pretend has been there all along. This was due to his company OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, the large language model released in November of that year, which had barely uttered its first chirpy, bullet-pointed answer to a recipe query before its name had become shorthand for the entire profusion of LLMs which followed. Soon, Altman was everywhere, prognosticating on all the ways AI could, would and should, transform, improve and/or destroy the world. He has, at different times, claimed AI would achieve superhuman intelligence by 2025, wipe out jobs that aren’t “real work”, turn intelligence into a utility that OpenAI sells to an increasingly stupid populace, and/or destroy humanity entirely. He has also expressed concerns that the entire AI market could be in “a bubble”. On that, at least, we agree.
Soon, however, her glasses were ready for collection – a bright pink pair she’d chosen herself on the day. Compared to the jam-jars I was used to seeing on kids in childhood, hers are positively chic; slim and contoured, in the manner of the specs worn by a feisty but intellectual professor in a streaming-only romcom. She’s taken to them with relish, vigilantly keeping them on at all times, and adorably fastidious in their upkeep. Watching her judiciously clean the lenses with her little cloth multiple times a day, it’s clear that part of the joy she takes in her glasses is in having things of her own and being granted responsibility to maintain them. But I can’t entirely dismiss the sense that a greater part of her joy is finally being able to see properly, after God knows how many months of seeing the world around her descend into a murky blur.
They’d want to see our eclipse. They’d want to look through the Earth’s atmosphere with their own eyes and see the moon fit over the sun, watch the light fade down to almost nothing, listen to the animals nearby fall silent and feel with their own skins the sudden chill in the air that comes with totality. Even if they can’t survive in our atmosphere, even if they need a spacesuit to keep them alive, they’d still want to get as close as they possibly could to seeing it in the raw, in as close to natural conditions as it’s possible to arrange. They’d want to be here, amongst us, when the shadow passes. “So that’s where you look for aliens. In the course of an eclipse totality track. When everybody else is looking awestruck at the sky, you need to be looking round for anybody who looks weird or overdressed, or who isn’t coming out of their RV or their moored yacht with the heavily smoked glass."
Even discounting the surface-level sheen of its more propagandistic presentations, the progress of man’s ascent into space is still a jaw-dropping endeavour to consider. In 1958, the longest commercial flight on Earth was Honolulu to Los Angeles (6 hours, 21 minutes). Eleven years later, a man would land on the moon. Between July 1969 and December 1972, 12 humans stood on our nearest cosmic neighbour. And then, well, none have done it since. It’s a strange fact, rarely dwelt on, that every single moonwalk was done not just five decades ago, but within a single 41-month period. To put that into context, it’s currently just over 41 months since Liz Truss lost her brave battle against a lettuce.
Marge Simpson saying "I just think they're neat". She means potatoes, and on that we do both agree, but I'm recontextualising said statement to explicitly say how neat I find the lovable dorks aboard Artemis II, for making an absolutely godawful attempt at creating a Full house opening titles montage.
I don’t think too hard about individual people forgetting mine in an email or a message. To be honest, I might not always remember to stick it in myself if I’m in a rush, not least since my version of Microsoft Word – the very programme I am using to write these words right now – renders the standard crtl+alt+e command as a euro symbol. (Though I’ve never stooped to calling myself S€amas, I have been known, in times of dire hangover, to source this errant é by googling Beyoncé).
Minister for Transport Darragh O'Brien standing in front of an RTE microphone, flanked by politicians in drab suits, in front of some balloons in a petrol station forecourt(?). All have looks of worry or distaste.
Central to the New Mexico prosecution were the insufficiently robust protections against child predation in Meta’s messaging apps. They proved this by sharing images of children with paedophiles through these services, raising questions of which children’s images they sent, and if consent or legal reporting was involved at any point. Leaving aside the jaw-dropping recklessness of these acts for one second, one is left wondering how the ruling’s most common interpretation among its boosters – that age verification statutes be mandated – would possibly help here. How, precisely, are age limits meant to stop adults from sending pictures of children, without their consent, to other adults? Here in the UK, we may see an echo of this incoherence in technology secretary Peter Kyle claiming that adults using age verification are keeping children safe. To which the only reasonable response is: how, exactly? The ongoing rush to ban social media for kids following the murder of Brianna Ghey – a teen who found her community online, before being killed, in real life, at the hands of transphobic bullies – leaves out how such a ban would stop this happening to another trans teen. The only plausible link, that consistent use of social media makes one transphobic and thus a danger to trans kids, seems unlikely to be what they mean, since this would require a social media ban for 80 per cent of this country’s broadsheet journalists and the entirety of the government’s front bench.
My 3yo daughter using the back of my head as a headrest while I watch ireland eat my soul piece by piece and she watches a Cocomelon video that could literally be a 45 hour long animation of the Anarchist Cookbook for all the attention I am paying to her viewing habits at this precise moment.
The TORSO INSIDE A HEART logo for the European qualifiers, which looks like it was made by your friend's nephew for an ISS Pro Evolution mod that gave every player a soul patch.
Mrs Doyle - a character created entirely by solo comedy writer Arthur Mathews - saying "Maybe I like the misery"
Hunger, it turns out, is the best sauce. After a decade of underperformance, the green shoots of the last two years achieved spectacular blossom in November. It’s redundant to say that international break was among the sporting highlights of my life, and more accurate to say it might have been among the highlights of my life full stop. The stomping pomp of Nathan Collins and Dara O’Shea against Portugal. The arc of Caoimhín Kelleher’s laser-guided Exocet into the Hungarian box. The insanity of Troy Parrott’s last-minute death strike that followed, adding to the madness of every one of the schoolboy dream five goals he scored across both legs. His tears in the post-match. My tears in my sitting room. Darragh Maloney’s voice giving out in the commentary box, his throat reduced, like mine, to strips of ribboned gore. In terms of concentrated darts of pure joy, unalloyed by the terror and self-doubt of watching my kids being born, or the vaguely anticlimactic stuffiness of any graduation or job offer you can name, nothing comes close. Within football itself, I was too young to really appreciate Italia 90 or USA 94, and no club football moment can really hold a candle. For Ireland, only late goals by Robbies Keane and Brady come particularly close, and even they might fall short because those come from times when my heart, not yet hardened, could conceive of late goals and puckish fortune, of Irish football as something worthy of the dreams we place inside it.
Some time in the early 1970s, Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes had a dishwasher installed in his SoHo townhouse. He received something of a shock upon noticing the man fixing his dishwasher was Philip Glass. “But you’re an artist” he exclaimed, demonstrating a faith in art’s profitability which, half a century later, seems almost quaint. “I explained” Glass recalls, “that I was an artist, but I was sometimes a plumber as well, and he should go away and let me finish”.
A glance at the timelines of people who look at oil charts for a living does not, to put it mildly, make for happy reading. Everything I know about Brent futures and WTI crude oil markets could fit along a single string of complex hydrocarbons, so I’ll admit the past week has been a time of learning for me. My casual understanding of the situation before this past weekend might have read something like the following: we’re gearing toward a “bad shock”, one in which fuel prices will increase at the pump, air travel will become more expensive, and our energy bills will go up by an anticipated £300 this summer. These are not minor disruptions, by any means, but they are so vanishingly small a piece of the actual crisis we’re in, that the next few paragraphs have been very little fun to research on your behalf.
Trump responds to a reporter on March 6th, who says Reporter: As you know, my son Joe is a college baseball player... Trump: How would I know that? He said "as you know" - I don't even know who the guy is.
Art by Berkan Özkan, depicting Leto II Atreides mid-3,500-year-reign, having turned himself into am invulnerable and immortal human/sandworm hybrid.