Fintan O'Toole and Sam McBride
Two of Ireland and Britain's sharpest political writers discuss democracy, power, and the shifting landscape of politics across the English-speaking world.
Why we picked this
O'Toole is arguably the finest political essayist writing in English today — his ability to dissect power with both fury and precision makes every public appearance an event.
Fintan O’Toole has been Ireland’s most incisive political essayist for decades, and his work on Brexit — particularly his book “Heroic Failure” — brought him to international attention as one of the few writers who could explain what was happening in British politics to audiences who found it genuinely incomprehensible. His analysis of how the English nationalist imagination constructed the EU as a villain, drawing on literary sources from Shakespeare to P.G. Wodehouse, remains one of the more original works of political writing to emerge from that period. His columns in the Irish Times have the quality of essays that will be read long after the immediate news cycle has moved on.
Sam McBride is a political journalist based in Belfast whose reporting on the RHI scandal — the “cash for ash” scheme that collapsed the Northern Ireland Executive in 2017 — earned him multiple awards and was the basis for his book “Burned.” His vantage point from Northern Ireland, a place where the constitutional questions O’Toole writes about are not abstract but immediately lived, gives him a different perspective on what democratic failure actually looks like on the ground.
The Irish Arts Center has built one of the better public intellectual event programs in New York, and placing these two writers in conversation — one working from the sweep of historical and cultural analysis, the other from the granular specifics of investigative reporting — should produce something more illuminating than either alone.