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…
Lia Mills writes: Kyiv is so beautiful, Victoria Amelina reflects in her posthumously published Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary, it’s no wonder Putin wants it. She also said, in a Dublin café in April 2022, that if Putin were to get what he wants and Russia steals Ukraine, she…
David Blake Knox writes: The four-part Netflix series Adolescence has generated a public response that has not been seen in the UK since the 1960s broadcast of the gritty BBC drama Cathy Come Home. That TV production portrayed the corrosive effects of homelessness on one family. The current series revolves around a young boy of…
Sean Sheehan writes: Traumas cause deep wounds and leave scars, so it is understandable that some veterans of Ireland’s civil war might want it best forgotten. I recall being advised, on the eve of a family occasion to which a survivor from the building of the Thai-Burma railway in Thailand was coming, that it would…
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…