Beyond Consolation: On How We Became Too Clever for God and Our Own Good  (Continuum, 2010)

A reflection on Irish society’s relationship with the Absolute, arising from a remarkable radio interview given by my late colleague, Nuala O’Faolain, on her diagnosis with terminal cancer.

Publication date: 2010

Waters explores the process by which the hope of a society was sabotaged and plundered in the name of a mis-defined freedom and a utopia of the now. In the late spring of 2008 the acclaimed Irish writer Nuala O’ Faolain went on a national Irish radio program to tell the Irish people that she was dying of cancer. She was frightened of death and of the short time left to her. She went right to the heart of the modern attitude to God, to hope, to life and death. Here was a spokesperson for a generation which now conjured up an abyss for itself, reviewing a culture she had inhabited and helped to create one last time.

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