1. It is a ‘sentimental mishmash . . . muddily photographed in flat television style.’ Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 2. It ‘invites you to have some wonderful dumb, callow fun.’ Pauline Kael 3. It was made for €12 million – even at the time a relatively small budget – and released on 4 June 1982, when I was not quite a year old. 4. I don’t remember the first time I saw it, though I can guess that it was probably around 1991, when I was ten. I must have watched it at least half a dozen times a year since then. I am now forty, which means that I have seen it some 180 times. If we factor in the period in the middle of my adolescence when I watched this film once a week – every Wednesday afternoon, when school finished early – we can...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, July 2023 Mark O’Connell’s latest book, A Thread of Violence, is about Malcolm Macarthur, who, in 1982, murdered a nurse, Bridie Gargan, and a farmer, Dónal Dunne. Macarthur was from an aristocratic background, but at the time of the murders he was on the brink of bankruptcy and risked losing his leisured lifestyle. His actions were part of a flawed plan to rob a bank, characterised by what O’Connell has called ‘the peculiar foolishness of the intellectual’, and Macarthur was eventually arrested at the home of Ireland’s attorney general, Patrick Connolly, a friend of Macarthur’s, who had no idea he was hiding a fugitive. The resulting political scandal almost brought down Charles Haughey’s government. The unlikely events were famously summarised by the acronym GUBU: grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. Macarthur served thirty years in prison for the murders. O’Connell is strangely haunted by Macarthur’s...

Liam Cagney | Tolka, Issue Two, December 2022 As Indrani and I sweep up the charred-black staircase past a precipitously tottering woman, and as we hand our coats and bags to the tattooed Garderobe worker, and as we slip into a dank graffitied toilet cubicle, then, buzzing to at last be here, sweep back downstairs into the bar, slipping through the chest-to-chest throng, all leather and beards and babble, I have no inkling of the paranoia into which, like a slobbering dog falling into canal slime, my night will plunge, because for now, as I glimpse Indrani’s complexion lit up George Grosz red, we are completely intoxicated by Griessmuehle’s carnival, the club girls in glitter-ball face masks, the sweating bears, the spilt drinks and music, a pandemonium that, after the quiet unreality I’ve endured recently alone in my high-rise flat, feels like a happy dose of unbridled realness. * It’s...

Isobel O’Donovan | Tolka Issue Four, February 2025 I remember my mother’s voice in the kitchen, as though choruses of her could spill from an opened cupboard. Among the delft and vocal cords, a nestle of laughs and cries pushed through the yellow yolk of the sun streaming through the window. My infant head laid on her chest, ear pressed to lung like a shell whispering of the sea. The place where sleep seeps through a tablecloth like spilt milk, ink. When the Internet unfastens my limbs from my mind, it is to this warm, lullabied body that I long to return. Something punctures the memory – a niggling feeling of is that all? Such multitudes of experience shaped into an apron by the cookiecutter of nostalgia. It’s better now, I think, as the clock counts hours that are just for me, no nappy cloth frozen solid on the line....