New book by Wicklow writers' group has stories and poems ‘that will break your heart'
The anthology also features photographs by Bray Camera Club, many of them local scenes, including the book's cover shot of Bray Head at sunrise.
The stories and poems range from a memoir of a life in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, to tales of family grievances and sliding door moments that change lives forever.
Founder of the group, Mairead De Bhal, believes there is something for every taste.
'The great thing about an anthology of different writers is that it will inevitably capture a full range of emotions,' she said. 'We have stories that will raise a smile next to poems that will break your heart.'
Alice Sheridan, a former journalist and magazine publisher, joined Sea Scribes to develop her fiction and contributes four short stories to the book.
She commented, 'There's a big difference between journalism and creative writing, and I relished the opportunity to focus on my fiction, especially when I knew it was supporting such a good cause as the RNLI.'
Barbara Murphy was one of the first to join the group, a Bray resident who has been involved with local writing initiatives for many years.
'It's a great way to develop your skills with like-minded people who share ideas and give constructive feedback. I'm delighted to be involved with the book,' she said.
Another of the writers, Tadg Paul, rediscovered a passion for poetry after an injury left him hospitalised for almost a year.
'I wrote a lot when I was younger and have come back to it with a new enthusiasm, thanks in part to SeaScribes and my involvement in the book,' he said.
Other contributors are Lesley Smith, Thomas McMahon, Naoimh O'Connor and Ian Campbell.
Cargo Of The Soul is available to buy on Amazon.ie and all profits go to the RNLI. The authors will be reading extracts from the book in Greystones Library on Saturday, July 12 at 3pm.
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Irish Independent
6 days ago
- Irish Independent
New book by Wicklow writers' group has stories and poems ‘that will break your heart'
The group of eight emerging writers meet weekly in a room above the Mermaid Theatre in Bray, and they pledged all profits from sales of the book to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). The anthology also features photographs by Bray Camera Club, many of them local scenes, including the book's cover shot of Bray Head at sunrise. The stories and poems range from a memoir of a life in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, to tales of family grievances and sliding door moments that change lives forever. Founder of the group, Mairead De Bhal, believes there is something for every taste. 'The great thing about an anthology of different writers is that it will inevitably capture a full range of emotions,' she said. 'We have stories that will raise a smile next to poems that will break your heart.' Alice Sheridan, a former journalist and magazine publisher, joined Sea Scribes to develop her fiction and contributes four short stories to the book. She commented, 'There's a big difference between journalism and creative writing, and I relished the opportunity to focus on my fiction, especially when I knew it was supporting such a good cause as the RNLI.' Barbara Murphy was one of the first to join the group, a Bray resident who has been involved with local writing initiatives for many years. 'It's a great way to develop your skills with like-minded people who share ideas and give constructive feedback. I'm delighted to be involved with the book,' she said. Another of the writers, Tadg Paul, rediscovered a passion for poetry after an injury left him hospitalised for almost a year. 'I wrote a lot when I was younger and have come back to it with a new enthusiasm, thanks in part to SeaScribes and my involvement in the book,' he said. Other contributors are Lesley Smith, Thomas McMahon, Naoimh O'Connor and Ian Campbell. Cargo Of The Soul is available to buy on and all profits go to the RNLI. The authors will be reading extracts from the book in Greystones Library on Saturday, July 12 at 3pm.
Irish Times
06-07-2025
- Irish Times
Using ChatGPT to write an essay is a bit like using a forklift to lift weights
A couple of weeks back, I did a public event in a bookshop, for which I and two other writers were each required to pick three beloved books, and to talk about each of them for five minutes or so. Choosing the books I wanted to talk about proved an interesting challenge, because although I can easily think of any number of books I have read and loved, it is considerably less easy to think of books I have not only read and loved but can also remember well enough to talk to an audience about for five minutes. A major criterion for the books I chose, I have to admit, was that I knew them well enough to not have to re-read them for the event. I felt that I had in some sense internalised these books, in a way that could not be said for very many others I had read. In the few days afterwards, I began to wonder why it was that I remembered certain books so well, and others barely at all. It is not uncommon for me to read and greatly enjoy a book and then, within a year or two, remember next to nothing about it other than, perhaps, that I once read and greatly enjoyed it. But there are books that, many years after reading them, have remained a presence in my life. And these books – the ones that seem to belong to some small and select psychic library, whose volumes collectively account for my basic sense of myself as a literate person – are, I realised, the books that I have written about. The Information, Martin Amis 's comedy of thwarted literary ambition and writerly jealousy, features a protagonist whose career as a novelist has devolved into ceaseless book reviewing – a job in which he takes no real pride, but which he nonetheless does very well. 'When he reviewed a book,' writes Amis, 'it stayed reviewed.' It's a line that comes to mind when I think about this subject. It is, for me, the act of writing about a book that causes it to stay read. And a disproportionate number of the books that have stayed read for me are ones that I wrote about at university. I read Ulysses and wrote an essay about it; the essay, I can assure you, was not very good, but the book stayed more or less read. I read and wrote about the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, and those stories stayed read. I read and wrote about Edgar Allen Poe, and Poe has stayed read. The writing of those essays was in some sense inseparable from the depth and durability of the reading. READ MORE [ Zuckerberg saying AI will cure loneliness is like big tobacco suggesting cigarettes can treat cancer Opens in new window ] I am saying all of this now because of two facts that seem fairly self-evident: the fact that the writing of essays is a central aspect of an education in the humanities, and the fact that this centrality is increasingly threatened as a result of the widespread use of ChatGPT and other LLM (large language model) technologies. The general feeling among university administrators, if not necessarily among academics as a whole, seems to be that it would be futile to try to stop students using AI in their work. The technology exists, and in the narrow sense of producing a functional piece of writing on a given topic, it's an effective tool, and it's not going anywhere. I've spoken to a few academics in the humanities recently who seem resigned to (though by no means at peace with) the idea that assessing students through essays may no longer be a viable pedagogical approach. No one seems quite sure what will replace essay writing, but it seems likely that something – a greater emphasis on written exams, perhaps, or some form of oral assessment – will have to. I wasn't a particularly industrious student as an undergraduate. I half-assed a lot of my courses, and often didn't do nearly enough reading of supplementary material – works of academic literary criticism and other secondary sources – to give my essays a plausible veneer of academic credibility and rigour. The essays I wrote were not especially good, even by the standards of undergraduate essays. But I realise now that their being good or bad was of secondary importance to the writing of them. The writing of essays seems to me to have two main uses as an educational tool. It is useful as a means of assessing a student – how much they know, how widely and deeply they have read in a subject, and how rigorous and original their thinking on that subject is. The other is both less measurable and more significant: in writing an essay, you find out what you think about a subject; you learn, in some sense, how to think about it. [ AI is already a focus of endless delusion, magical thinking and plain old foolishness ] In a recent study conducted by MIT's Media Lab, three groups of participants, aged 18-39, were asked to write essays using, respectively, ChatGPT, Google's search engine and no technology at all. The brain activity of the participants was measured using EEG. Of the three groups, the ChatGPT users consistently had the lowest level of brain engagement, and 'consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels'. As the study progressed, the group using ChatGPT got steadily lazier with each subsequent essay, often simply copying and pasting the text produced by the LLM, rather than using it as a source for their own work. One way of thinking about this, from an educational perspective, is that writing an essay is to one's intellect as lifting weights is to one's muscles. The point of going to the gym is not to get good at lifting weights; it's to train your body to become stronger. Using ChatGPT to write an essay is a bit like using a forklift to lift weights. The forklift might do a perfectly good job of moving around some heavy iron plates, but you'd be wasting your time. (You would also be causing a serious disruption, and would probably have your gym membership cancelled – and rightly so.) Just as you can't get someone, or something, to work out for you, there is nobody and nothing that can think on your behalf. As with so many of the supposed benefits of so-called artificial intelligence, it's not clear what we're actually gaining. What we stand to lose is so large, and so fundamental, as to be incalculable.
Extra.ie
04-07-2025
- Extra.ie
Marian Price sues Disney over Say Nothing series
Old Bailey bomber Marian Price has sued Disney over an allegation in its Say Nothing series that she shot dead Jean McConville. The veteran Republican, also known as Marian McGlinchey, has previously denied firing the shots that killed the mother of ten more than 50 years ago. Ms McGlinchey, a former member of the Provisional IRA, claimed through her lawyers that she had 'no alternative' but to sue The Walt Disney Company Ltd and Minim Productions Ltd. Marian Price. Pic: George Sweeney/REX/Shutterstock Say Nothing, a nine-part Disney+ series, focused on the life of her late sister, Dolours Price. The pair were convicted for their part in the IRA car-bomb attack on London's Old Bailey in 1973. A plenary summons in Ms McGlinchey's defamation case was filed at the High Court in Dublin on Wednesday, and yesterday her solicitors, Belfast-based Phoenix Law, confirmed that legal proceedings are under way. It said these followed 'the egregious and defamatory allegations levelled at our client in the Say Nothing series'. Jean McConville. Pic: REX/Shutterstock The legal firm continued: 'Both entities have failed to take steps to rectify their actions, causing continuing and untold damage and harm to our client. 'Our client has therefore been left with no alternative but to issue formal legal proceedings to establish the truth and to protect her reputation.' Solicitor Victoria Haddock stated: 'Our client should not be placed in the position of having to take formal legal action to vindicate her reputation. Marian Price. Pic: Niall Carson/PA Wire 'Despite multiple opportunities to address the defamatory content of the Say Nothing series, Disney and Minim Productions have failed to take any step to do so. 'There is no justification for making abhorrent accusations under the guise of entertainment and we will be seeking to hold all responsible parties to account.' Ms McConville was abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1972, after being accused by the IRA of passing information to British forces. Her body was found at Shelling Hill beach in Co. Louth, in 2003. In 1999, the IRA acknowledged it had killed Ms McConville and eight others of the Disappeared. A report by the Police Ombudsman found no evidence that she had ever been an informer. At the launch of the series last year, Disney described Say Nothing as 'a gripping story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland during The Troubles'. Say Nothing is based on the 2018 book of the same name by Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. In an interview last December, he said he was 'completely certain' Marian McGlinchey was the third member of an IRA team who killed Ms McConville. At the time the book was published, Ms McGlinchey released a statement through solicitor Peter Corrigan, also of Phoenix Law. He said: 'My client Marian Price vehemently denies any involvement in the murder of Jean McConville. No legal action followed the publication of the book.
