Stephen Holland - Multimedia Journalist

The Mole Agent is a 2020 documentary directed by Maite Alberdi. It tells the story of an 84 year old man named Sergio who is hired by a private investigator to go undercover in a nursing home in Chile. What starts as a quirky take on hardboiled detective fiction turns into a profound meditation on isolation and loneliness. The private investigator has been hired by the daughter of a resident in the nursing home. She believes that her mother is being abused by the staff and that they are stealing from her. In order to get to the bottom of this the detective hires Sergio to go undercover in the nursing home for three months. Sergio is recently widowed and says that wants some excitement back in his life, he needs a reason to get up in the morning, he longs for purpose. Sergio is stylish and elegant, kind and considerate. Once he enters the nursing home, which is almost all female, the residents nickname him the gentleman and everyone is intrigued by this new resident. “He seems lucid,” o...

I used to let anxiety consume me. I was always worrying about how I was being perceived, or that I was doing the wrong thing, or that nobody liked me. It was draining, it was upsetting, and it was just so common. One thing that has surprised me ever since I started to talk openly about my anxiety is just how many other people are going through the exact same thing. Anxiety is a universal issue, maybe some people have it worse than others, but I think we all have it to some extent. The trick is not to let it take over, not let it become you, not let it define you. Anxiety Is Something That Happens To You This is something that took me a long time to really take in. No one is defined by their emotions. You are not sad, you are not angry, you are not anxious. You just feel sad, or angry, or anxious. Emotions come and go and that is normal. They are not tied to your identity and just because you are feeling particularly anxious in a certain social situation that does not mean that it alway...

We all have those books, novels, and plays that we wish we could read if only we had the time. While the idea of finally reading Don Quixote , War and Peace, or the Iliad sounds so enticing, life inevitably gets in the way and as the years go on it gets less and less likely that you are ever going to tackle these behemoths of literature. This is how I left for a long time and a couple of years ago I decided to do something about it. Each year I would challenge myself to read one difficult book. At the beginning of January, I would decide what it would be and from then I had until December 31 st to complete it. This method saw me finally tick books off my reading list that without it would have remained there for the rest of my life. Books that you know will be great, and informative, and you will remember forever, but somehow the motivation to start them is never there. In 2017, it was Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, a novel that has so much to teach us about what it means to be a...

The news that the Pontins campsite chain in the UK had a blacklist of Irish surnames which they labelled “undesirable guests” came as a shock to many, who saw it as discriminatory, racist, and unjust. This was the initial reaction as all the headlines said was, “Irish surnames”. But upon further investigation you learn that this policy was designed to exclude Gypsies and Travellers and was not aimed at everyday settled Irish people. This is when a lot of the shock, horror, and outrage began to dissipate and suddenly this was no longer the broad issue of social injustice that it first seemed. Why is that? Why is it that in an age rampant activism and accountability Travellers are so often left out of the conversation surrounding racism? As If it does not count when it is just Travellers? It is often claimed that Ireland is not racist, and we can point to the Pontins scandal and say, “isn’t it just awful what they’ve done in the UK”. But when it comes to discussions surrounding Traveller...

Gautama Buddha once said, ““the past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live, and that is the present moment”.  People have always tended to either live in a rose-tinted recollection of an Ill remembered past, or an over-exaggeration estimation on the possibilities of the future. Never has this been truer than under the gaze of Covid19. With nothing to do but ponder over memories from the before times, or to dream of the day someday soon when things will have gone back to normal. The question I wish to investigate today is, have people lost hope in the future thanks to this virus?  My answer to this question would be: No.  We have not lost hope in the future, but I think we may put too much hope in it. Every conversation I have is about what we will do in future, how great things will be when we can, or remembering back to when we used to be able to do this or that.  But we are alive today and whether we like it or not the...

  We are now the midst of Lent, but does that really mean anything in the world we live in today? The purpose of Lent is for Christians to prepare for the coming of Easter through penance and self-denial. It lasts for 40 days in commemoration of the 40 days and nights Jesus spent fasting in the Judaean Desert. As if through mimicking his actions, by abstaining from something that we enjoy, we can more thoroughly understand Christ and thus be brought closer to God. It is a noble concept, but in 2021 it can all feel a little bit old world and outdated. When I was a child, I took Lent very seriously. My two sisters and I would give up sweets every year. No chocolate, no jellies, no biscuits. If it was sweet, it was off limits. Occasionally we would make an exception for the St Patrick’s Day parade when sweets would be thrown out to the crowd. Although to me this felt sinful, like I had broken a sacred pact with God. I knew I should not do it, but the ChupaChups from the Sligo scouts b...

Saturday Night Fever was first released in 1977. The movie was a massive commercial success and had a colossal effect on popular culture in the late 1970s. It helped to popularise disco music around the world and cemented John Travolta as a huge movie star. The soundtrack includes songs by the Bee Gees and is still one of the greatest selling movie soundtracks of all time. These days, the film is mostly remembered for its extended dance routines, which you do have to admit are still incredible. But this movie is so much than that, and if you can look past its cheesy exterior for a moment, you will find a film that has a lot of say about the era it comes out of.  Saturday Night Fever tells the story of Tony Manero, a young working-class Italian-American from Brooklyn who spends his weekends dancing and drinking at the local discotheque. He is working a dead-end job, his parents do not respect him or support him, gang violence and racial tensions have ravaged his neighbourhood, and ...

  Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan My rating: 4 of 5 stars In Megan Nolan’s debut novel, Acts of Desperation , we get a glimpse into the interior romantic life of an unnamed narrator, her co-dependent relationship with a boy named Ciaran, and the consequences of obsessive love. Romantic attachments can be so frustratingly complicated. Sometimes from the outside it is easy to look at a relationship and see everything that is wrong with it. But just like the narrator’s friends in this book there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can see from the outset that the road she is walking down is paved with heartache and pain. That this is going to end in disaster. But unless you are the person in the relationship, you will never truly understand it. But that is what Nolan does with this novel, she makes us understand. Told through first person we get to experience the anxieties, self-destructive tendencies, and hedonistic indulgences of a young girl in Dublin who craves validation f...

The current lockdown situation is a difficult time for everyone. It can lead to feelings of isolation and hopelessness. When people are separated from their friends, family and loved ones, it’s easy to feel emotionally and spiritually bereft. Books are one source that can help ease the burden of seclusion. A truly great novel can teach us things about ourselves and help to give us strength and resilience that we never knew we had. Here are just a few books that I read when I feel like I need some guidance on this earth. I think each of these stories in their own way have something to tell us about the nature of the human condition, what it means to be alive, and how even when you’re feeling your most hopeless, there can always be a light at the end of the tunnel.  The Five People You Meet in Heaven This heart-warming novel by Mitch Albom examines what it means to exist on this planet and the events that unwittingly effect our experience of being alive. It follows the life and death...

You hear it all the time: Cinema is dying. In the age of streaming who’s still going to the cinema? Why would you spend all that extra money when you can watch new movies from the comfort of your own home? Or even, if you’re feeling lazy, from the comfort of your own bed. As lockdown continues and movie theatres have had to shut their doors, we don’t have a choice, we need to stay home and see what’s on the tube, or Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or Disney+, or NowTV. It goes on and on. But when restrictions are lifted, will we all flock back, or have people become too dependent on streaming services to return to the cinema?  Warner Bros. seems to think that they have, announcing plans to release all its films on HBO Max throughout 2021. This decision affects major releases like The Matrix 4, The Suicide Squad, and Dune . This game changing decision may have significant ramifications for the big screen if other studios decide to follow suit. Exclusivity has always been seen as the bigge...

Billionaires around the globe have increased their wealth in this pandemic by nearly a trillion euro. At what point is it too much and how did the world even get like this in the first place? The birth of modern capitalism as we know it can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th century. New manufacturing processes meant that production could be ramped up to unprecedented levels. But It wasn’t the workers benefiting from this, it was the factory owners and the ruling elite. This led to huge profits and excessive wealth. It’s after this time that we begin to see the beginnings of huge income disparity between members of the general population. This level of imbalance would have previously only been attainable by royalty. The age of the multi-millionaire beginnings with John Jacob Astor, an investor who smuggled opium into China and used the profits to invest in real estate around New York City. At the time of his death in 1848, he was the richest per...

Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel My rating: 5 of 5 stars Less Is More is a book by economic anthropologist Jason Hickel. It examines the reality of climate change in the world today and tackles the true root of the problem: Capitalism. This book explains that if we truly wish to overcome the largest issue humanity has ever faced, that there is only one solution and that is degrowth. Capitalism is run on the concept of perpetual economic expansion, but the consequence of this is that it will never be enough. There is no end point to capitalism, there is no moment when giant corporations say, “Okay, that’s enough money, time to restore the amazon”. If we wish to restore the planet and save it from utter destruction, we need to find balance and that balance is diametrically opposed to the values of capitalism. These are the concepts that Hickel outlines in his book, offering statistics and examples that would shock and appal even the most staunchly con...