Maurice Fitzpatrick writes: There is an urgent need for the US to evaluate the consequences of the full-scale assault on its democracy. One way to begin is to examine the alarming parallels in the US now with one of the most horrific periods of human history. Thirty years ago, in June 1995, Italian critic Umberto…
This blog was written before the death of Pope Francis. Michael J Farrell writes: I often wish people would ask me what’s on my mind. What I would then tell them is anyone’s guess. But if the pope were in the news, I might tell the inquiring entity about my novel, Papabile, written forty-odd years…
David Blake Knox writes: Thirty-five years have now passed since civil war erupted in the Balkans. In 1990, the Yugoslav federation began to tear itself apart, with insurrections breaking out in most of its six constituent republics. Wars in the Balkans have book-ended and characterised much of the twentieth century in Europe. This one proved…
Katrina Goldstone writes: A month and a half before he died, I wrote to my friend the poet Gerry Dawe proposing we do a book together. A few times over our nearly thirty-year friendship, we’d talked about joint projects where our interests intersected. But it never happened, probably because Gerry was so prolific and disciplined…
Dermot Hodson writes: Of the dark past A child is born; With joy and grief My heart is torn. Written on the occasions of his grandson’s birth in February 1932 and his father’s death two months earlier, the opening lines of James Joyce’s poem ‘Ecce Puer’ are among the author’s most personal. The strained…
Eve Patten writes: On December 10th, 1923, the poet WB Yeats addressed those gathered for the Nobel Prize ceremony banquet at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Speaking of the honour brought to Ireland by his award for Literature, he acknowledged a circle of fellow Irish writers who had worked to free their country from provincialism…
Robin Wilkinson writes: Whenever I came over from London to visit my cousins in Co Meath, long before the M3 cut a swathe through the Boyne Valley, I’d catch the Dublin to Kells bus and have the driver let me off at the turning to Tara. That meant moving up to the front at Ross…
Dr Struan Kennedy writes: This year marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement which formally ended thirty years of the conflict known as the Troubles. Naturally there has been a series of events commemorating this significant milestone which have, just as understandably, celebrated the achievements of those involved in bringing…
John Fanning writes: Maurice Earls’s thought-provoking essay ‘The State Of Us’ (February drb) is a valuable contribution to a much-needed debate on our future direction at a time when the world is drifting unsteadily towards an as yet unknown destination. The fall-out from the 2008 great recession is still reverberating and has been further complicated…
On May 22nd last, Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University gave a talk at Maynooth University (and at Trinity College the next day) entitled ‘The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine’. Khalidi, who is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, is a highly distinguished historian of the Middle East, with many books to…