Ériu is the sovereign goddess of Ireland. She woke me from a dream many years ago with the seed of this poem, and over the next number of months travelling I spent my time cultivating it into what it became. Her song here is sang by Claire Maguire.

The Dream of Fódhla was inspired by something I heard the great Kerry philosopher John Moriarty say once, that we needed to reimagine Ireland through the eyes of Fódhla, the earth goddess of Irish mythology. Fódhla came to me in a dream one night singing her song, Ámhran na Crainn, and I wrote the poem inspired by that dream and the landscape of County Sligo. Her song here is sang by Aoife Ní Shúilleabháin, who also plays the part of Fódhla in the video.

I wrote Before you push the chair back in 2016, in an effort to try and help those suffering under the weight of the modern world. This version of it was recorded live in The Abbey Theatre in Dublin, that was founded by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory “To bring upon the stage the deepest emotions of Ireland.”

The idea to reimagine Cúchulainn - the legendary hero of the Ulster Cycle in Irish mythology - through a modern lens came to me after a trip out to Inisfallen on Lough Léin - the Lake of Learning - in Killarney.

I started writing Was It For This? in September 2013, in the week that I found out I was becoming a father, and recorded it outside an old barn in June 2014 when my son Rowan was two weeks old. It was inspired by the Yeats poem September 1913, and grew legs when I realised there were many aspects of Ireland that the same question could be asked of.

An Email from Dog to Man is a love letter from Man’s Best Friend.

After performing the Email from Dog at many gigs over the years, people often came up to me after the shows to tell me that they felt the dog was a bit harsh on the cat. So I figured that in the interests of fairness the cat was due a right of reply. As such, ‘A Letter from the Right Honourable Cat, to His Lowliness, Man’, was born.

The Ghost of Fionn MacCumhaill came to me in 2010, when I was living and working in South Korea. It was inspired by one of my earliest childhood memories of my maternal grandparents, and of my grandfather in the role of the mythic leader of the Fianna, Fionn MacCumhaill.

In Irish mythology Mánannan Mac Lir was the God of the Sea and the God of the otherworld. The belief long ago was that he was in possession of the holy grail, which would break fi three lies were told over it and could only be restored if three truths were told to counteract the lies. Such was the belief in this that the British Israelites came to Ireland and ransacked the sacred sites in search of the holy grail, not to realise that it was a way of seeing, and a way of being. This poem is dedicated to the memory of Seán Ó’Conaill, the seanchaí of Cill Rialaig on Bolus Head on the Iveragh peninsula in Kerry, where the poem was written.

I got the idea for Zoom Call in October 2020, when the world had lost its collective mind, based on an idea of a chancer called Liam Malone conducting job interviews on Zoom for a shady new venture with a collection of contrary characters.

The Trust Machine is a short film that I wrote for the director Risteard O’Domhnaill, using the Greek myth of Sisyphus as an allegory for the nature of the financial world. It follows his journey through fiat currency through the financial collapse to the coming age of crypto and Central Bank Digital Currencies.

The Dobharchú is a story of legend that comes from Glenade Valley in County Leitrim. My retelling of it was to mark the 300th anniversary of the event.

In January 2021, myself and a dear friend of mine had an idea that the worship of Nostrils may be a unifying theme to bring people together in a divided world. We established The Church of Nostrology for the sake of our own amusement, in the hope that it may bring a laugh and a scents of joy to others too.

I wrote Hold Tight as an ode to the memory of a dear friend of mine, Gar Kane, who died in October 2020, but also as a love letter to the arts and to my own recovery from serious illness earlier in the year.

The Healing is a response poem of sorts to the illusory success of going viral, and the idea of online success. The internet is undoubtedly a wonderful tool in its ways, when we can use it as such, but there is no doubt in my mind that our collective addiction to it comes at a cost to our objective presence in the world.