The Author, Séamas O'Reilly

@seamas

Author, very professional. Buy my debut novel PRESTIGE DRAMA at Get my extremely good memoir at www.mammybook.com

2,306 Following33,558 Followers2,989 Posts

YouTube Website Bluesky

writing

Is this your profile?Claim it and seamas.dirty.social is yours.Claim profile

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· 25d

My country childhood: a profile in courage.

Such gatherings were, however, rare. I grew up in the open countryside of the Derry/Donegal border and had few people – let alone children my own age – anywhere near us. We weren’t in a village or even a loosely coherent townland. There was no church or pub or GAA club, no post office or parish hall. Just a dozen-or-so properties, most of them farms, spread across a sprawling five-mile patchwork of fields that meandered back and forth across a border to which nobody paid much attention.

I’m acutely aware of – and as a memoirist, professionally hindered by – the fact that memories from childhood rarely hold up. But I do remember feeling deeply envious of families who lived around other people. I used to thrill at depictions of suburban kids in Hollywood films, or city dwellers on TV sitcoms; people who had neighbours who’d drop in unannounced and wisecrack with our heroes as if they were their second family. People who had neighbours full-stop.

I longed to be part of a gang of local kids, meeting up over long summer holidays so we could ride our bikes in striped T-shirts, trade football stickers, get into PG-rated scrapes and maybe go hunting for a dead body or two. I don’t wish to state that this was a lonely existence. Nature did, after all, furnish me with 10 siblings, so solitude was not a state I was gifted with at any point in my upbringing.

It’s just that few of my siblings were excited by the prospect of locating a cadaver with me, so there was always an extra frisson of specialness to those occasions when our house was filled with people to whom I was not directly related.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· 26d

Wouldn't be in a rush to take credit for that one, lads.

Tweet from Spectator journalist James Heale: Told Tory MPs have a new nickname for Burnham: "Eyelashes"

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· 27d

Cowardly fraud @patrickfreyne.bsky.social is attempting to draw me out for a CAGE MATCH via another of his childish taunts. Well, I'm game if he is. Let's just say **everyone should buy tickets to this event** and I'd urge anyone in the front row to wear the plastic ponchos provided.

ADVERTISEMENT FOR MYSELF AND PATRICK FREYNE'S SHOWDOWN AT THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL, highlighting that it is on Friday 21st August 2026 at 18.15, overlaid with my dear close personal friend Patrick's comment "I'm not saying this Edinburgh festival event with my literary foe is going to be a cage match but...".

Patrick looks windswept and handsome, albeit clasping a hand to his head in the manner of someone who's seen a better, more handsome author, summit the turnbuckle for a devastating moonsault.

I look beautiful, stately and serene, caught in a poignant reverie of that one time I smashed Patrick's face in with a chair at the Dalkey Book Festival

A lightly edited reprint of the famous Andre The Giant quote about Hulk Hogan, with his name changed to SEAMAS THE AUTHOR and Hogan's name changed to Patrick Freyne.

"I don't like to speak badly of people. I have grown up thinking and being told that if you cannot say something nice about someone, you should not say anything at all. But I must break that rule in this case because I hate Patrick Freyne very much. He is a big ugly goon and I want to squash his face.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· 27d

The greatest scene in Come Dine With Me history, when Peter decries Jane and her "sad little life"

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jul 10

📵

Social media bans are popular because they seem pleasingly dramatic to those of us who have neuroses about our own screen time, and wish to launder them as concerns for children’s safety. They’re also a “free hit”, since the adult population are slow to be moved by the harms such bans might cause children, and governments care even less since they exclusively affect people who can neither vote nor put money in their coffers.
A serious approach to mitigating online harms is possible. Such measures are, in fact, already enshrined in laws we refuse to enact. We could hold tech companies materially responsible for the bile and misinformation they spread. We could institute moderation and controls, with severe legal and financial penalties, for platforms such as X that profit from the spread of child abuse imagery and racial hatred. We could improve media literacy by teaching our children how to spot slop, misinformation and spam in the wild, perhaps teaching ourselves a little about that task in the process.

Tech giants are materially invested in all the worst aspects of the modern web. The hatred, the bile, the scams and the misinformation all exist because someone somewhere is making a lot of money, influence or political capital from their existence. It’s in their power to change it, and I believe it’s in ours to make them do so.
Increasingly, however, it seems like we’ve decided to punish our children instead, banning them via processes that will not make the web safer for any of us but will – surprise surprise – allow those very same tech companies to make an additional killing by implementing age verification.

The current UK recommendations suggest social media blackouts for under-16s, with a further “curfew” mooted for 16- to 17-year-olds, restricting access to their accounts after a certain time of day.
Never mind that we are asking young people to be isolated from services and platforms now so intrinsic to modern life that they are how most of us get all our news and entertainment, maintain social relationships and acquire employment.
Never mind that bypassing these restrictions will be so elementary as to be pointless, with the added benefit of criminalising kids who do so. Never mind that a 16-year-old in Britain might soon be legally eligible to fight and die in a war but not to watch a YouTube video after dark.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jul 7

Hang it in the Musée Magritte.

Lukaku, in Belgium's Magritte inspired away kit, taunting the most American fans ever devised, decked out in stars and stripes

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jul 6

Gianni: Ahhh Mr President, we might, if you could be so kind, ehh, in a manner of speaking, keep this little favour, ehhh, between us, no? Trump:

$Tweet by Aaron Rupar of Trump briefing the White House press corps: rump on Balogun: "I saw the play, and I'm a person that loves sports ... that wasn't a foul. That wasn't even an infraction ... this referee, who is a little bit suspect if you check his past. He made a call that nobody could believe ... he's our best player, or one of our best players. And he gave him a red card. I didn't know what that meant ... yes, I asked for a review by FIFA."$

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jul 6

I'll admit there is something bleakly funny about Infantino finally getting some meaningful pushback re: FIFA's brazen corruption, only for Trump and co to spend all day openly bragging about it from the Oval Office.

Screenshot from Twitter of Ted Cruz addressing Trump in the Oval Office.

Cruz: On behalf of all Americans, thank you for getting rid of that ridiculous red card.

President Trump: That was interesting.

Cruz: It was spectacular. There was a reason the FIFA trophy sat here for as long as it did

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jul 6

remember when john hinckley got out of prison and started tweeting about how political violence was bad

A tweet by THE Sepp Blatter: Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls. They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies. If a U.S. President intervenes with the FIFA President - and a player is suddenly cleared before a World Cup knockout match - the question is unavoidable: Quo vadis, FIFA?

Football must never become a playground for political power. #FIFA #WorldCup #GianniInfantino #DonaldTrump

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jul 4

⚽🙍‍♂️

My first sign that these stickers might not be all they’re promised was when I tried to open one of the bloody things. Peeling each from its backing becomes a deadening grind in which you massage the edges of a micron-thin piece of paper like a safe-cracker probing for weak spots. I was obsessed with football sticker books as a kid and don’t remember them being sealed together with the chemical bond of a hydrogen atom. Granted, my son does it with much less fuss, because he has the small, dainty hands of a porcelain doll, but even he has given up on several occasions, leaving a small, sad pile of dog-eared men in the corner of our sittingroom.

Things do not improve once you attempt to stick them in since they’re not numbered sequentially, but by nation. Crumlin’s Cape Verdean sweetheart Pico Lopes, for example, is listed as CPV4. Since the teams are listed in order of their starting group, you are required to thumb your way to the opening pages to see where each nation is listed, and then trek back from there. This might seem a small quibble, but in our age of perfectly fashioned user experience, it feels a little like having to switch your phone on and off each time you want to read an email.

It’s probably smart that the album features just 18 players for each team, plus a badge and squad photo, since a 48-team tournament adds up to 1,248 players, and representing every single one would begin to feel like a census of every adult male on Earth. Unfortunately, they select these names far in advance of squad announcements, which means almost every page features players who won’t be playing. While England fans might smirk at the inclusion of Trent Alexander-Arnold, Cole Palmer and Phil Foden, one does wonder how a Ghanaian fan would feel, since a whopping eight out of the 18 players listed in their section didn’t make their final squad. In all, the book features 119 players who will not be lacing up their boots in North America – which, at just shy of 14 per cent of the total, seems a lot.

In fairness, this matters little to my son, who knows few footballers by name and is less interested in a perfectly accurate catalogue than in the capitalistic accumulation of small collectable units themselves. If it’s capitalism he’s after, the book certainly delivers, from the double-page backspread dedicated to Official Partner Coca-Cola to the three separate advertising slots allotted to Lynx deodorants – including two tear-out scratch-and-sniff samples – and another for Fifa’s official app.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 26

⚽⚽⚽

I’ve tried to get him to watch football with me, but boredom usually sets in within minutes. I have managed to get him interested in five-minute highlights of games, compressing each roomy 90 minutes into a wall-to-wall collation of fouls, goals and screaming. “Highlights are better,” he tells me, and I inwardly cheer as I watch him reach for a book or tablet after three minutes, rather than the usual 30 seconds.
As a player, he’s less eager still. I used to bring him to a weekly toddler-ball club in our local park, during which I discovered just how good a three-year-old could be at football. Sadly, that three-year-old was named Jamie, and he spent most of his time dribbling rings around my son, who mostly practised falling over. When he professed a preference to spend his Saturday mornings playing chess or drawing illustrations for his home-made comics, I didn’t mind very much.

Through his eyes, I see the ways in which football might be off-putting: the baffling complexity of its internecine struggles; the labyrinthine intricacy of the game’s rules; the perversity of the constant changes to those rules; and the fact that, at each season’s end, it all starts over again, in a Sisyphean trudge toward an ever-moving horizon of permanent victory that will not and cannot arrive.

I’ll even admit that the average football match has fewer propulsive thrills than either Gaelic games or rugby, sports I know much less about, but find objectively more attractive as spectator events. I’ve attended two Premier League games in the past year and neither were as gripping as the two matches I went to at the Masters in Alexandra Palace in London in January – this despite snooker being a sport about which I know the square root of nothing at all.

Soon, I realised there was no greater social lubricant on planet Earth. Stick 20 children in a room and watch them hug the walls like wallflowers at a mineral disco. Throw them in a field with a football, and they’ll be lifelong friends within minutes.
I suppose it’s this aspect of football I’d love my son to cherish: the community, the bonding, the bloody-minded obsession. And thankfully, I’ve seen success in persuading him of this via football’s one, true dirty-little-secret: it is also the single nerdiest thing on planet Earth.

“This is every single team and player that’s taking part,” I tell him on the third day of the tournament, handing him an official guide crammed with numbers and stats. I see his eyes widen with every grid and graph, a smile spreading across his face as I unfurl the ungainly wall chart collating all 104 games across the six weeks to come. I point out the key players, the favourites, the dark horses. And the formations, the tactics, the hidden histories of streaks and curses coursing back through nearly a century of World Cups that have gone before.

“The truth about football,” I say, as his head hums with all this delicious data, “is that it’s just Pokémon for human beings.” Soon, he’s studying the brackets and theorising on which teams will win and by how much. Yes, he’s perhaps overly obsessed with the matches in which Ronaldo and Messi will be playing, but I don’t mind since he’s soon asking me, with genuine interest, when the next game is on.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 25

Huge get for Charlton here, all the smart money was on him going to Nvidia.

Charlotnafc official site headline: Alan Curbishley named Head of Artifical Intelligence, under an impossibly charming photo of the puppy-faced former manager smiling at a desk with a Charlton-sticker-bedecked laptop.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 24

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 23

just one of those sequences of words we'll all be reading to our grandkids on our rafts www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 22

good luck to roisin murphy with banning trans people from those concerts she speaks of

Roisin Murphy's tour schedule showing a perfect absence of Upcoming Concerts: a void, a blank, an arid wasteland of shows, perhaps because her existing fanbase was 80% queer people, and one would have to presume 99% queer friendly.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 21

Love to confidentially inform the leader of the UK's greatest ally that Starmer is resigning, so he can tell the entire world while using it as an excuse to call him a useless failure.

Truth social post by Donald Trump: Keir Starmer will resign as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He failed badly on two very important subjects- IMMIGRATION AND ENERGY (OPEN NORTH SEA PIL!). I wish him well! President DJT

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 18

This is, unironically, what my auntie Patricia said to my mum on the occasion of her eighth pregnancy, which was probably fair enough.

Patricia later told me she did occasionally diverge from
fulsome support, as when, two babies later, she took the caffein
ated nausea call and betrayed her shock with an exclamation of
‘Jesus Christ, Sheila’, which stung my mother slightly.
‘Oh, I thought you’d be pleased,’ she said. ‘You’re always
pleased when I’m pregnant.’

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Patricia shot back, ‘please don’t
think you have to keep doing it to make me happy.’
Undeterred, my mother went on to have three more chil
dren, the first of whom was me

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 15

people clowning on this take, but almost everyone I know who voted to repeal the eighth did so because they thought abortions built houses

Tweet from Catholic Arena saying: In 2018, most Irish young people voted for abortion because they were told it would create a bold new Ireland where all their dreams would come true

Now, most of them can't afford to buy a house

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 12

Please send me any and all stock images you've seen which are just nebulously newsy words clumsily rendered as a key on a computer keyboard. Feel like I've seen thousands of them over the years, and this is a beautifully stupid example of the genre.

Hollywood Reporter headline about "a Peter Thiel-backed tribunal putting journalists on trial" with a stock image of the word Guilty rendered on a computer keyboard.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 12

On legitimising yet another pogrom.

Some prefer to step two degrees away from the above conclusion, blaming the violence not on one discrete crime, but rather on long-simmering discontent about “unfettered immigration”, to use the words offered by loyalist MP Jim Allister, in the wake of last year’s Ballymena riots. Such riots are appalling, the argument goes, but their anger reflects a legitimate concern; that immigration has simply gone too far.

Again, we risk demeaning ourselves by pointing out that rates of migration into Northern Ireland have never been connected to any rise in crime, and represent a tremendous benefit to the economy, from workers in hospitality and agri-business sectors to manufacturing and academia. Migrants are most beneficial in the health and care sectors, with 22 per cent of carers in the state coming from outside the UK and Ireland, without whom Tracey Reid, chief executive of the Northern Ireland Social Care Council, says the sector “could not survive”. Such statistics are, of course, broadly similar throughout the UK and Ireland, and were regarded as truisms until it became seemingly gauche for any prominent newspaper or politician to repeat them, in favour of contorting gymnastically to flatter the perceptions and prejudices of those who just hate migrants for entirely racist reasons. No matter how much they contribute to society, and no matter how few of them there are.

A compelling argument that this is the case can be found in the demographics of Northern Ireland itself. Its current population is just shy of two million. According to the most recent figures available, net migration in the state between 2001 and 2023 amounted to around 62,000 people, including less than 2,400 refugees in secure accommodation. Ballymena, which until this week had been the most prominent site of anti-immigrant violence in the state, sits in the Mid and East Antrim council area, which has seen fewer than 5,000 international migrants settle there this century. Only 3 per cent of Northern Ireland’s population belong to any ethnic minority at all.

For those of us who find the constant discussion of “the immigration problem” dehumanising and dishonest in any context, it’s revealing to see it deployed in places where immigration barely exists, not least for what it might suggest about such legitimate concerns everywhere else. We are left to presume that any number of non-white faces, no matter how few, is a salient enough horror for locals that their concerns become legitimised automatically. Even one, it would seem, is one too many.

Most confusing of all has been the near-total absence of any context regarding who, exactly, is committing all this violence. The reluctance among media outlets to specify that these pogroms are the work of far-right loyalist gangs is particularly odd, given that such groups are fond of signing their work. The LVF, and associated gangs, have for decades sprayed their tags on the houses of the people they burn out, whether Catholics, economic migrants or refugees. Even now their graffiti proudly adorns walls and estates, demanding they be reserved for “locals only”. I’m old enough to remember when the LVF attacked the specially modified home of a severely disabled child because his family was insufficiently Protestant. I’m old enough to remember it because it happened less than two years ago.

When loyalist gangs burned Catholic families out of their homes in past years, there were few stern and sombre pleas that we should understand the arsonists’ concerns. Nor was there a reflexive jolt to place such acts in a context the perpetrators themselves might have liked, perhaps by drawing direct links between their violent acts and the existence of alleged crimes committed by disconnected Catholics many miles away. That this same logic is no longer applied to vast acts of violence against dozens of non-white people of all nationalities in Belfast, purportedly due to the actions of a single man from Sudan, is as preposterous as it is repulsive.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 11

As I wrote at the time of the Ballymena pogroms, I'm old enough to remember when the LVF attacked the home of disabled child because he was insuficciently Protestant. I'm old enough to remember this because it happened in 2024. www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co...

Last July, the family of Jessy Clark, a nine-year-old boy with multiple serious disabilities, were allocated a newbuild bungalow in the Ballycraigy estate in Antrim town.

The home was purpose-built to provide for Jessy’s medical needs, allowing him the facility to bathe and use his wheelchair, freedoms he’d been denied in the hospital bed he’d been living in for years.

Shortly before the family were due to move in, the house was attacked with bricks and paint bombs.

Soon its boarded-up windows featured graffiti of crosshairs, and slogans declared that all such housing was for “locals only”.

The LVF-affiliated group responsible for this were implicated in a several other attacks in the area, driving eight African families out of their homes in the few weeks previous.

Deducing this took little by way of detective work, since the group posted laminated signs around the area declaring “No Undesirables… No Multiculturalism” and warnings to “keyboard warriors” that their home might be next.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· Jun 2

The ongoing lurch to the far right in British politics leaves the press constantly fiddling the numbers to make The Great Replacement theory respectable. I wrote this a year ago, when the Telegraph tried the same asinine sleight of hand. www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co...

When, this week, the Telegraph printed a rabidly scaremongering report that “White British people will be a minority in 40 years”, they clarified this cohort as “the white British share of the population — defined as people who do not have an immigrant parent”.

Leaving aside how garbled that formulation is — there are millions of non-white Brits who meet that definition perfectly — it carried with it a parallel consequence. I myself do not have an immigrant parent.

In fact, every single pale and freckled ancestor of mine since 1800, Irish farmers to a soul, was born and raised in something called the United Kingdom. This is true for a large number of Irish people in the North. And since the late Prince Philip was himself a Greek immigrant, it gives me great pleasure to point out that they’d settled on a definition of ‘White British’ which includes Gerry Adams but excludes King Charles III.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· May 31

why does he look like he's in dictionary corner on countdown tho

adorable nerd auteur Guillermo del Toro doing a BFI vid on breaking into the industry, in which he appears to be sitting in the selfsame worn office chair and placid blue background utilised on Channel 4 daytime lexi-quiz Countdown

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· May 29

"Father of two O'Reilly, a capo within the McGullion fuel laundering gang, was shot six times and left for dead as part of an ongoing feud with the Dempsey charcoal briquettes cartel. He's represented by CAA Literary, and Prestige Drama is available in all good bookshops now".

A photo of me - looking quite delish if I may say so myself - headed with the Sunday World's new CRIMEWORLD branding and typography.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· May 29

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· May 20

I wrote this about the supreme court ruling last April and sadly, despite repeated slapdowns in court and increasing evidence that ordinary people are not the swivel-eyed transphobe obsessive this government believes, every word of it still applies. www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co...

We might also consider what this means for the millions of cis women who do not fit the standard, sexist notion of “femininity” which logic dictates they must be checked against to enforce this ruling.

Too tall, perhaps, too strong-jawed, or short-haired — anything that one patron, one witness, one supermarket or leisure centre security guard might consider cause to question their femininity. And how might they prove their “real” gender?

How would you? Perhaps my conception of feminism has been mis-calibrated all this time, and true freedom for women is mandating that they carry their birth certificates around with them all day, so they can be checked by citizen genital inspectors, male and female, encouraged to presume you’re a predator first, and work backwards from there.

What conceivable application of this ruling, you might ask, could possibly result in less distress and harassment, even for the cis women it purports to protect?

Let us speak as adults. Despite being around 0.5% of the population, trans people have spent the past decade being attacked in one of the most flagrant moral panics ever perpetrated on the British public.

Spread in the name of a “feminism” centred on a small, committed group of active transphobes backed by the entire might of British politics and media, including every misogynist you can name; either because they share this gut-level hatred of trans folks, or simply because it serves their political interests to heap sadism on a vulnerable minority, instead of addressing the multiple overlapping crises that face the British public, and in which they are directly complicit.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· May 19

FUN FACT: the idea for this came to me a few issues earlier, after I'd asked some very stupid questions of some very important people, as part of my favourite ever The Fence feature, Why Are You Asking Me This? One, suggested by my brother @daraor.bsky.social, garnered the following response.

Is prune juice the juice removed from plums to turn them into prunes, or is it the juice further removed from prunes?

[The Estate of TS Eliot declined to respond.]

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· May 14

Only just clocked the excellent attribution IrelandAM used for me during my appearance on Monday. 10/10. No notes.

An image of my, the author Séamas O'Reilly, atop a chyron which reads:

Séamas O'Reilly
AUTHOR/HAS TEN SIBLINGS

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· May 12

Thanks very much to Tommy Bowe and Muireann O'Connell for having me back on the sofa for the release of my novel, Prestige Drama. Very disappointed in Tommy for doing all his links excellently and creating zero viral moments, but he has pledged to do better next time and I accept this.

Me, the author Séamas O'Reilly, in between Muirean and Tommy from Ireland AM. Tommy is clutching a copy of my excellent book, Prestige Drama. Both seem frankly awed by my literary genius.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas· May 7

Today is publication day for my book, Prestige Drama. It's a funny, angry book about Derry, memory and Troubles-scented television. I think it's quite good, however I can *confirm* that it's quite short. But don't take my word for how great it is, look at all these lovely people saying that.