John Waters is an Irish thinker, talker, and writer. From the life of the spirit of society to the infinite reach of rock ‘n’ roll; from the puzzle of the human ‘I’ to the true nature of money; from the attempted murder of fatherhood to the slow death of the novel, he speaks and writes about his uniquely personal and original understandings of the meaning of life in the modern world. [Biography continues below]
He began part-time work as a journalist in 1981, with Hot Press, Ireland’s leading rock ‘n’ roll magazine, and became a full-time journalist in 1984, when he moved from the Wild West to the capital, Dublin. As a journalist, magazine editor and columnist, he specialised from the start in raising unpopular issues of public importance, including the psychic cost of colonialism and the denial of rights to fathers under what is called family 'law'.
He was a columnist with the Irish Times for 24 years when being Ireland's premier newspaper still meant something. He left in 2014 when this had come to mean diddly-squat, and drew the blinds fully on Irish journalism a year later after the ransacking of the Constitution of Ireland to bulldoze through gay marriage.
Since then, his articles have appeared in, inter alia, First Things, frontpagemag.com, The Spectator, and The Spectator USA. He has published ten books, the most recent, Give Us Back the Bad Roads (2018), being a reflection on the cultural disintegration of Ireland since 1990, in the form of a letter to his late father.
He is a sometime playwright, songwriter, husband of Rita, father of Róisín, brother of three sisters (one deceased), step-granddad of angels, nationist, Irish nationalist, civilizationalist and lapsed agnostic. He was born in County Roscommon, belongs to Sligo, and lives in Dublin, though not all the time.
John Waters also writes on Substack.
