INTERVIEWS

“Half English, half Danish and made in Cork” is how northsider Sam Simpson introduces himself to Mary O’Brien. “Cork done the damage,” he adds laughing. Now living in West Cork and part of the West Cork for Palestine Group that organised the recent sponsored walk from Bantry to Mizen Head, […]

If “Boldness be my friend” then Swedish native and blow-in to West Cork, Katarina Runske, 60, will surely never be lonely. One of West Cork’s most enduring entrepreneurs, who moved to Durrus from Stockholm as a young, single mother in 1989, Katarina has certainly never been shy of taking a […]

In the eighties and nineties word spread in rural West Cork about a friendly Dutch doctor who gave time to his patients and even served up apple tart in the waiting room. Not only that, the tiny white pills he prescribed at the end of a session seemed to cure […]

A Benedictine monk from a centuries-old monastery in Switzerland, Brother Martin Hieronymi recently traded the foothills of the Alps for the foothills of Mount Gabriel in Schull, where he travelled to improve his English at the Atlantic School of English and Active Leisure. Settling easily into village life, during his […]

As the song goes ‘Count your life by smiles, not tears’, a message reinforced by 81-year-old Patty Mullaney, drawing on her years of wisdom. Most days Patty feels about 35, but on the days she feels closer to 90, she says “It really does help to smile”. In between walking […]