ANYONE reading this has either seen or heard of the film Reservoir Dogs. The classic mob movie features a gang of criminals stuck in a room waiting for information that never arrives which leads to increasing tension and a grand crescendo of operatic violence. What fewer people know is Quentin Tarantino’s gangster classic is simply Samuel Beckett’s Absurdist Play Waiting for Godot reimagined in a mobster setting.

IT IS perhaps the human condition to take for granted your good fortune. However, I have no excuse for failing to regularly remind myself that for the past 30 years, I’ve been able to call Ireland’s best-kept secret my homeplace.