– Securing the terrain
An essay often begins with a claim that feels too sharp, too certain, too easily said. Something like: immigration is destroying the economy. A sentence that appears to know exactly what it means. A sentence that demands to be challenged.
Irish writers have always understood this tension. Myles na gCopaleen could puncture a confident claim with a single twist of satire; Joyce could unravel it into the private machinery of thought. And Hubert Butler — the one, to whom, I’m perhaps closest — examined statements with a quiet, forensic clarity that left no room for cant. He showed that a position becomes interesting only when you start to test it.
That’s where the essay begins. To essay is to attempt: to take a statement and follow its logic, not to inflame or reassure, but to understand what lies beneath it. Where did the idea come from? What fear or experience or assumption gives it shape? What happens when we press on it, or turn it around, or look at it from the side?
Montaigne did this with himself. Zola did it with society. Sartre did it with history. Irish writers have done it with everything from nationhood to nonsense. The essay is not where opinions go to be confirmed. It’s where they go to be examined.
That’s the work I’m interested in here. Not slogans, not certainties, but the attempt to think through the things we say — especially the things we say too quickly. An essay is a way of slowing down a thought long enough to see what it’s made of.
This site is where I’ll try to do that. To take a position, hold it up to the light, and see what remains.
David Marshall
30 January 2026
Skerries
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