Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, was a psychologically rich, emotive journey into the psyches of two Irish teenagers who fall in love. Only two years on from publication, it has been turned into a 12-part series from the BBC and Hulu. 

When Sea Fever premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, no one could have guessed its story about an Irish fishing trawler attacked by a giant jellyfish would in one respect prove prophetic. 

St. Patrick’s Day, and socialising itself, has been all but cancelled. But turn the rickety door-handle of a bohemian pub near Brighton station, and a poignant scene is unfolding.

Nick Rowland marks his breakout from TV drama with this very competent feature, an adaptation of Colin Barrett’s short story. Set in a bleak, rural Ireland, Cosmo Jarvis plays Arm, an ex-boxer with an estranged girlfriend, a non-verbal, autistic five-year-old son and the kinds of friends who get him into trouble.

Some wondrous acting is sacrificed on the altar of an increasingly wonky plot in On Blueberry Hill, the first play in 10 years from Sebastian Barry, the Irish playwright and novelist whose onetime Royal Court entry The Steward of Christendom showcased a treasured theatrical memory in the leading performance of the late and truly great Donal McCann.

The new Boomtown Rats album – their first for 36 years! – is both preposterous and rather wonderful. This is as it should be. The Irish band surfed the so-called “New Wave” after punk rock to brief chart-topping stardom. They had some cracking songs (“Rat Trap” is a gem), but were reviled by the era’s Year Zero arbiters of taste.

Recent politics surround the EU and nationhood, fantasies of Irish Sea bridges and trading borders more porous than limestone have revived the granular rub between Eire and Britain, and the Celtic Tiger cool of the Nineties is a history module these days.

The Dingle Peninsula is a thumb of land that protrudes into the Atlantic as if trying to hitch a ride from Ireland to America. The choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan recently moved there, and its crags and vales and unspoilt coast have sucked him into an older, slower way of life that – paradoxically, because his work was and remains radical – has given him a shot in the arm.

There’s such remarkable symbiosis between material and performance in Irish dramatist Margaret Perry’s Collapsible that you wonder how the hour-long monologue will fare in any future incarnation. I don’t know how much Perry had the performer specifically in mind when she wrote the piece, nor whether they developed it together in rehearsal, but the fusion feels total.

The news that the Continuity IRA created a bomb destined for England on Brexit Day has added to the timeliness of this revival of Joseph Crilly’s gut-punching comedy.