Threshold- Listening Library

A Man Is Only As Good (Pat Boran)  Skipping (Pat Boran)  Corner Boys (Pat Boran)  Fetch! (Pat Boran)  Widow Shopping In Portlaoise (Pat Boran)  Machines (Pat Boran)  Station Road, Sutton (Pat Boran) 

What happens when four people, three old sea hands and a novice (the author) cross the Atlantic aboard a 70-foot schooner? Sailing For Home captures the realities of a trans-Atlantic passage, the importance of innumerable small rituals, the challenge of cooking in rough seas, the unspoken understandings that develop between crew members but he also attends to the numinous possibilities of life at...

When their father’s business fails, Eliza and Jonty Kane move to a tenement flat in Dublin city, number 16 Henrietta Street. From a crowded tenement to the dazzling world of the circus – can dreams really come true? A tale of bravery, adventure and bee charming!

It’s so peaceful down here. I’m not going back. Escaping the minutia of other people’s ordinary lives, like driving alone to be by yourself, I enjoy slipping below the surface from it all, looking back, from my coma. I remember, how it really was. How the truth would be so shocking. A recount of family, life, domestic violence and shame.

Mrs Foster is someone who feels much calmer when she is able to arrive early or on time for appointments and events. Mr Foster, less so – or rather it soon becomes apparent that he takes a peculiar enjoyment in making his wife miss things or be late for them. However, this being a Dahl story, we know that vices such as greed, selfishness and inconsiderateness tend to boomerang back upon the person...

A girl, a shapeshifter, was going home from the beach in Dad’s car with ‘Lightning Paws’; the idea of a panther with a hoverboard. She loved him because he was cool. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t make mistakes. He didn’t flinch. He was fluid, fluent, at one with wind and speed .. What you learn on a trip to the beach: the Nature, and a shamanic oneness .. all in 10 minutes!

Time hardly mattered in the village of Mucker, the birthplace of poet and writer Patrick Kavanagh. Full of wry humour, Kavanagh's unsentimental and evocative account of his Irish rural upbringing describes a patriarchal society surviving on the edge of poverty, sustained by the land and an insatiable love of gossip.

Mickey Donnelly is smart, which isn’t a good thing in his part of town. Despite having a dog called Killer and being in love with the girl next door, everyone calls him ‘gay’. It doesn’t help that his best friend is his little sister, Wee Maggie, and that everyone knows he loves his Ma more than anything in the world. He doesn’t think much of his older brother Paddy and really doesn’t like his Da....

Cathy was often wrong, she found it more interesting. She was wrong about the taste of bananas. She was wrong about the future of the bob. She was wrong about where her life ended up. She loved corners, surprise, changes of light. Cathy leads a rather conventional life, married to a 'safe' man, working behind a handbag counter in Dublin. What happens when control and repression are explode...

Prayer Before Birth (Louis MacNeice) The Poem (Donald Hall) A Mayo Tao (Derek Mahon) Questions About Angels (Billy Cullens) Making Love Outside Áras an Úachtarán (Paul Durcan) Still I Rise (Maya Angelou)

Basho in Ireland (Billy Cullens) Apple Blossom (Louis MacNeice) When All The Others Were Away At Mass (Séamus Heaney) Digging (Séamus Heaney) God Says Yes To Me (Kaylin Haught) I Rely On You (Hovis Presley)

Crossing The Threshold (Paula Meehan) At The Spring Equinox (Paula Meehan)

The Meaning Of A Word (Pearse Hutchinson) Bicycle (Vincent Woods) Soul (Vincent Woods) Ainm (Vincent Woods) Poet’s Truth (Vincent Woods) Tommy Graltan: Hitman (Vincent Woods) Caveat Emptor (Henry Glassie) Indiana Day (Vincent Woods)

A ticklish cough leads to a delve into the realisation, rationalising, the surgery, and the acceptance of a lung cancer diagnosis despite never smoking in his life. And, that the sinister smudge on his x-rays keeps moving only deepens the mystery.

My first room was big, in a house in the country. Animals were everywhere but no animals were ever allowed upstairs. Later, flat-sitting in London, in bed-sits in Cork and Dublin, and voyages far and abroad - mid an ambience of mushrooms on the ceiling of the shared toilet on the return of the stairs .. and the like - I lived the adventures of a renter. I’m lucky. I’ve always had some kind of roof...

A collection of poems about the beautiful, majestic Connemara pony.

Dead, or pretending? Death has its own particular stillness. Foaming at the mouth, his eyes bulging and black. Kit retrieved the sliotar from betwixt Rashers gnashers. Out. Out. Get it out! Seth Cullen was now god among the boys, scared rabbits, and victorious wolf packs of Carrick Cove.

Mags Duffy, lone wolf and union woman through and through, left a boring union conference as two days of Irish icy-snow had brought town to a halt. Freezing! Worst cold spell in a generation. Night Creatures focuses on a taxi driver on New Year’s Eve in Dublin. Not many on the slushy roads. Roving cab-seekers flock and mob the streets. You have to stand your ground. Coffee and Star Bars would keep...

Arriving at science's definitive answers to some of the most controversial topics human beings have to grapple with, Never Mind the B******s is a celebration of science and hard facts in a time of fake news and sometimes unhelpful groupthink. Professor Luke O’Neill grapples with life’s biggest questions and tells us what science has to say about them, covering topics from global pandemics to g...

At the beginning of the 20th Century the great German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, living in Paris at the time, got a letter from an aspiring young poet looking for an opinion on his poems. This gave rise to an extended correspondence where Rilke deals with the very Nature of creativity itself. Listen to Rilke’s first letter of reply: Paris, February 17th, 1903. Dear Sir, ..

Full of wry humour, Kavanagh's unsentimental and evocative account of his Irish, rural upbringing describes a patriarchal society surviving on the edge of poverty, sustained by the land, and an insatiable love of gossip.

Mohammed and Josef are chatting about life as a refugee and the trouble in finding somewhere to live. However, shelter is not the only necessity of life. Josef searches for love in Ireland on dating sites. But would he be giving away a peace he had come to appreciate? Searching the internet reveals opportunity and anxiety to @brownlady_12345.

Noel's parents had split when he was a boy and his mother had gone on to a successful singing career. But when he has a chance to reunite with her, he does not know how to handle the opportunity.

A young boy works for a theatrical agency in Dublin as an errand boy. This is his first job ever and he loves running errands for the two men who own the agency. The most exciting thing that happened during the day was when a "musical hall lady" came into the agency. Everybody in the office went crazy when one walked in. The boy's encounter with a rhinoceros is hilarious, as is his c...

“I had five maiden aunts, and they doted on me.” A Man’s World contains a blueprint of Brian Friel’s acclaimed Dancing at Lughnasa. Picking up your aunts at the train station, they rustle your hair, man-handle you, wait expectingly for a party-piece and, though still a wee man of only five or six, note the becoming of a man in you. The world of rural Donegal and the drama and characters who fill i...