Javier Marías, who died on Sunday in Madrid from pneumonia, contracted after a bout of Covid, was probably the Spanish writer best-known outside his...

Maurice Earls writes: Following the Treaty of Limerick, Ireland’s capacity to put an army on the field capable of defeating the English ended. For...

Marie Sherlock writes: Looking from the outside in, Ireland is a paradox of plenty. Despite the havoc wreaked by the pandemic, our economy expanded...

  Maurice Earls writes: It was reported recently in the Financial Times that the British might cut off gas supplies to Ireland this winter. And...

Maurice Earls writes: In response to the invasion of Ukraine and more particularly in response to the European reaction to that invasion, people in...

John Fleming writes: A sturdy melodic voice emanates from a man whose face and twisted body communicate some existential torture. Precise narrative lyrics work with...

  Maurice Earls writes: A story entitled “Three Glimpses of Life”, written by Patrick Kavanagh in preparation for his landmark novel Tarry Flynn, is a...

Enda O’Doherty writes: Back in the 1990s I went on a short “study trip” to Germany as part of a small group of journalists,...

Tom Hennigan writes: After the swift unravelling of the Soviet Union, its strategic thinkers scrambled to justify Russia’s demand for continuing influence in lands...

  Maurice Earls writes: Micheál Martin was in Washington for St Patrick’s Day and caught Covid, or perhaps he brought it with him. Either way...

  Dave Duggan writes: In 1990, Routledge published The Death of the Irish Language by Reg Hindley. I was writing radio drama in English and...

  Enda O’Doherty writes: With the publication yesterday (March 7th) by France’s constitutional council of the list of approved candidates, the campaign for the presidential...

  Maurice Earls writes: Everyone agrees that James Joyce, who was born 140 years ago today (February 2nd), was unusually observant. Somehow he captured what...

Enda O’Doherty writes: When people choose to comment on the affairs of another country it can often be that, as they speak, they are...

  Frank Callanan died suddenly at his Dublin home on December 12th last year. Frank was a distinguished senior counsel and historian. The author of...

Enda O’Doherty writes: One of the more amusing moments in the neither long nor glorious history of far-right politics in Ireland came in the...

Michael O’Loughlin writes: Back in the mid-1980s, after several years living in Amsterdam, I rashly decided that what that great city needed was a...

Maurice Earls writes: Gaelic culture and society collapsed in Ireland from the late seventeenth century on following several centuries of attack and military defeat....

Enda O’Doherty writes: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” the celebrated American baseball catcher Yogi Berra is reported to have said....

When Johnny Goes Marching Maurice Earls writes: As some may recall, a few years ago genetic studies emerged which revealed that in excess of twenty...

Richard Bourke Two years after the 1920 Government of Ireland Act which first established Northern Ireland as a distinct jurisdiction within the United Kingdom, Ronald...

John Fanning The Irish, Terry Eagleton wrote, were put on earth for other people to feel romantic about. If the positive image we have long...

If we were to pledge not to buy another book until we’d read every last one we have on our shelves at home, booksellers and publishers would soon go out of business. They should not worry, however, for our desire to buy and to collect seems to be unquenchable. As Italo Calvino observed, behind the doors of the bookshop a formidable array of volumes is always waiting to ambush you.

Those who partake in ‘decommemorating’, in the form of pulling down statues or otherwise, frequently see themselves as agents of oblivion, determined to efface an undesirable memory. But in the very act of calling attention to an offensive monument, they are in effect agents of memory, unwittingly reviving remembrance of the memorial they seek to supplant.

This article is adapted from the introduction to Reclaiming the European Street: Speeches on Europe and the European Union, 2016-2020, by Michael D Higgins,...