John Waters is an Irish columnist and author whose career began in 1981 with the Irish political-music magazine Hot Press. He went on to write for the Sunday Tribune and later edited In Dublin magazine and Magill. Waters has written several books and, in 1998, he devised The Whoseday Book — which contains quotes, writings and pictures of 365 Irish writers and musicians – that raised some €3 million for the Irish Hospice Foundation.

He wrote a weekly Friday column for The Irish Times. He was briefly fired during a dispute with the then editor, Geraldine Kennedy, but was shortly thereafter reinstated.In March 2014, Waters left The Irish Times, and shortly after started writing columns for the Sunday Independent and Irish Independent. In 2018 he released a new book called Give Us Back the Bad Roads. Waters is a fortnightly contributor to the American journal First Things and is a Permanent Research Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Culture, University of Notre Dame.