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…
Maurice Earls writes: The Trump presidency is in the process of taking full political control in the United States. This is something which the framers of the American constitution very much wished to avoid. Institutional checks were written in. The houses of congress and the laws of the Republic have long operated as formidable constitutional…
Gerard Smyth writes: War poet. Love poet. Nature poet. Elegist. Witness to the ‘Troubles’ and what in one poem he calls ‘the stereophonic nightmare / Of the Shankill and the Falls’. Michael Longley had a superb capacity to invent variations on his themes, and each became intrinsic to his art. The sustaining element across his…
Michael Lillis writes: President John F Kennedy was the guest of the Irish government for fully two days and two half-days between June 26th and 29th, 1963. Thirteen years later, by the summer of 1976, it had become obvious to me, influenced by a series of conversations with John Hume and a few others, that…
Catherine Toal writes: The beauty of an historic Irish house is shot through with horror. That castellated manor rising at the end of the grassy avenue was a barracks in Cromwell’s time. And don’t even think about what the view from this remote abbey must have looked like around 1847. If only such places were…
Michael Lillis writes: During March 1993 I met with Gerry Adams for two full days and one half-day in Dublin and briefly afterwards at a house in West Belfast. I had left the Irish public service in 1990, where I had served as diplomatic adviser to the taoiseach in 1982 and a negotiator of the…
John Fanning writes: Trump 2 arrives at a time when a new world order, or disorder, as it has been called, is already well under way. If Britain ruled the waves, and a good part of the land, in the nineteenth century and America took over the reins in the twentieth we now seem to…
Maurice Earls writes: Eoghan Murphy, former housing minister and once the most unpopular man in Ireland, has recently published a political memoir. The purpose is to give his side of the story and let the world know that he is a decent human being who did his best in an impossible situation and that after…
James Moran writes: In November 2008 I was in New York City when Barack Obama was elected. The city felt absolutely electric. I can remember so clearly how, the day after the result, a young man serving sandwiches in a coffee shop dropped absolutely all of the behavioural codes of New York when I ordered…
Frank Freeman writes: I want to say to Trump supporters: ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t vote for a man who mocks handicapped people, who calls dead veterans “suckers and losers”, who says if you’re rich and famous you can sexually assault women and they won’t do anything about it, who sleeps with a porn star…