I was twenty-nine when the call came in from Stoneybatter, and I remember thinking, in the foolish way you do before a bad thing shows its face, that I’d still make it…

I was nine the first time I walked into Mr. Kavanagh’s café with no money. It was a narrow place off Dublin’s northside, not far from the bus stop where my mother…

The first coat belonged to my daughter, Maeve, and it was far too small for her. Red, with a missing button and a hood shaped like a little bear’s head. She was…

I first noticed her because she was always there before the kettle boiled. I was working as a healthcare assistant in a ward near the old side of the Mater, doing the…

I was thirteen when I learned that kindness can be quiet. Not the sort that arrives with speeches or a photograph for the school newsletter, but the sort that slips in through…

I lost my wallet on a wet Thursday evening in Dublin, the kind of rain that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air and slowly enter your bones. I had…

I was eight when I decided my mother needed flowers. Not wanted them, needed them. There is a difference a child can feel before he has the words for it. We were…

I used to work the Sunday evening shift in a nursing home near Glasnevin, the kind of place where the kettle was never cold and the television was always a little too…

I used to get the 16 from near Dublin Airport into town for work, back when my life was held together by early alarms, instant coffee, and the hope that nobody would…

Every Friday at exactly ten past one, an elderly man came into the little café where I worked near Smithfield. He wore the same brown wool coat, the kind that had gone…