LORNA SIGGINS, Marine Correspondent

THE CAPTAIN of the Asgard II has expressed confidence that the national sail training vessel can be raised from the seabed off north-west France.

Capt Colm Newport, who was responsible for the safe evacuation of all 24 fellow crew and trainees from the vessel last September, hopes that approval for the salvage will be given by Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea after a second survey. Capt Newport confirmed to RTÉ yesterday that the vessel's rigging was largely intact, and said that a salvage partner had been identified after a "fairly lengthy" tendering process.

However, the west Cork based company which is due to carry out a second underwater survey of the ship in mid-January says that trawling in the area could inflict damage upon the hull if it remains much longer on the seabed.

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IT'S 3 a.m. at Doheny & Nesbitt, a favorite watering hole of Dublin's political and business elite, and the property tycoon Sean Dunne stoops to retrieve a penny from the pub's grimy floor.

One would think that Mr. Dunne, Ireland's best-known building developer, would be in bed at this hour. It's a weeknight, after all, and he has meetings that begin before first light.

What's more, the Irish economy, pummeled by the most severe housing bust in Europe, has collapsed. And the gossip around town is that Mr. Dunne, whose brazen deal-making and Donald Trump-like lifestyle epitomized the country's euphoric boom, might be going bankrupt.

But, no matter, a penny is a penny.
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By Sarah Lyall

BUNDORAN, Ireland -- It was a typical late-winter day on the Irish coast, no worse than usual. Bands of black clouds sailed ominously across the sky. Rain bucketed down in freezing torrents. Icy winds pummeled and churned the ocean.

Joanne Fulton sat in her wet suit with a group of friends in a van in the parking lot above the beach, ashen and shivering.

This is après-surf, Irish style, and the whole enterprise has a unique and subtle appeal. "It is very, very cold," Ms. Fulton observed. "But once you get in, the wet suit keeps you warm. Although my hands actually have no feeling. Or my face and feet."

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The Cripple of Inishmaan, currently being revived at the Atlantic Theater, is one of the plays by which Martin McDonagh became well known. (The others are The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and The Lonesome West.) All written in a short period of time, they're the plays of an intelligent young man out to make a name for himself, displaying all the good and bad qualities that situation implies. With their zestful storytelling and sardonic humor comes an ingenuity that sometimes turns glibly show-offy and manipulative. With their arrestingly dark vision comes a kind of smirking satisfaction in glutting the audience's appetite for unpleasantness or explicit violence.
more from The Village Voice's snarky review here

Speaking Synge

Stephen Gabis comes across like speech therapy. That's because Mr. Gabis is a go-to dialect coach whose craft can be heard on Broadway and beyond.
He just did a production of "The Playboy of the Western World" for Queens College, NY. It's one of the most difficult things. I find it tougher than Shakespeare, that particular play by John Millington Synge.
He went to the Aran Islands and literally listened to people through keyholes. English was the second language. Most of them spoke Irish Gaelic first, and the specific Gaelic of that province, of Connacht. It's written in convoluted language. You can't say "I love you." You say things like [speaking in an Irish accent], "It is to you I might be thinking of giving love next Thursday if I'm not milking the cows and stuck somewhere because I drank too much." [back to an American accent] It's a real roundabout way of speaking. It's tonal, like Chinese.
WITH talk of diphthongs and tongue positions, a dialogue session with  His fluency with accents helps make the rounded vowels of "The Seafarer" or the dropped r's of "To Kill a Mockingbird" sound authentic enough to sometimes fool even native speakers of the represented regions.
Read the full NYTimes profile here

On a Barren Isle, Gift of the Gab and Subversive Charm

By BEN BRANTLEY

For those of you for whom an annual reading of "A Christmas Carol" is as welcome as a two-ton fruitcake, the Atlantic and Druid Theater Companies have provided a savory alternative. That's the fine imported Irish revival of Martin McDonagh's "Cripple of Inishmaan," which opened Sunday night at the Linda Gross Theater, offering its own salty variation on that sugarplum Tiny Tim. He is called Cripple Billy, and like Dickens's beloved tot, he is sickly, misshapen and deeply wistful. I can promise you, though, that he isn't about to say, "God bless us, everyone."
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By WILLIAM GRIMES

Conor Cruise O'Brien, an Irish diplomat, politician, man of letters and public intellectual who staked out an independent position for Ireland in the United Nations and, despite his Catholic origins, championed the rights of Protestants in Northern Ireland has. He was 91

Once described by the social critic Christopher Hitchens as "an internationalist, a wit, a polymath and a provocateur," Mr. O'Brien was a rare combination of scholar and public servant who applied his erudition and stylish pen to a long list of causes, some hopeless, others made less so by his combative reasoning. When called upon, he would put down his pen and enter the fray, more often than not emerging bruised and bloodied.

As a diplomat, he helped chart Ireland's course as an independent, anticolonialist voice at the United Nations and played a critical role in the United Nations intervention in Congo in 1961. 

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By Mary Jordan

DUBLIN -- Jason Bissett, 30, sat on a busy pedestrian bridge that arches over the River Liffey, a hood pulled tight around his head and his hand out.

"Can you spare any change? Please. Can you spare any change?" he asked softly, aware that police now consider "aggressive" begging a crime. Last month, the government announced a crackdown on hostile panhandlers, introducing the first new laws against begging since the Potato Famine in the 1840s. A conviction could lead to as much as a month in jail or a 700 euro fine, about $976, according to a Justice Ministry statement, which said the final language of the measure will be published soon.

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NEWRY, -- During the decades of the "Troubles" here, long lines of traffic at the Irish border usually were a sign that the British military was searching vehicles on the road ahead. But these days the lines of traffic leading off the main highway north to this city just inside Northern Ireland are not about guns as much as butter: shoppers from the south are heading north to spend their euros in the malls and supermarkets here. There's more