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, drawn chiefly from the newly democratised countries of central and eastern Europe. There were Poles, Lithuanians, Romanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, a Hungarian, a Georgian and – to make up the numbers…
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 suddenly beyond its control. One of the earliest terms coined for their emerging policy was the Monroeski Doctrine, which enters the historical record in August 1992, just seven months after Moscow…
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 it was bad luck. The unfortunate man had to confine himself within in the Irish embassy. One would imagine the gilt wore off the gingerbread inside the embassy quick enough….
Dave Duggan writes: In 1990, Routledge published The Death of the Irish Language by Reg Hindley. I was writing radio drama in English and in Irish at the time, but my day-job was in a bookshop. Dealing with publishers’ representatives, “reps”, was one of my roles, including for books in and concerning Irish. The…
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 election, to be held over two rounds on April 10th and 24th, may be said to have been officially launched. The candidates and their affiliations are as follows: Emmanuel Macron…
Maurice Earls writes: Everyone agrees that James Joyce, who was born 140 years ago today (February 2nd), was unusually observant. Somehow he captured what he observed, the people, the places, the moods, the furniture, the pain, the tone, the feelings, everything, in words. The detailed mosaic, particularly of lower middle-class life in Edwardian Dublin,…
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 thinking more of their own. And this may be particularly true of French comment on England. Montesquieu and Voltaire were so taken by English liberty that they appear not to have…
Frank Callanan died suddenly at his Dublin home on December 12th last year. Frank was a distinguished senior counsel and historian. The author of ground-breaking works on the politics of Ireland between the Land War and the independence period, he combined careers at the front rank of the Bar and as 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 late 1990s when an election candidate carrying the banner for Ireland for the Irish expounded on the (many) reasons why immigration was a bad thing. The particular one that has stuck…
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 night of Irish poetry, to introduce Ireland’s leading poets to the Mokummers, as natives of Amsterdam like to call themselves. I thought that the city’s main poetry festival, the idiosyncratic “One…