Latest Blogs
The men that is now
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,…
Can we afford the price of greed?
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 1956-2021
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…
How can you sell Killarney?
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…
Mahon in the Milky Way
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…
The Execrable System
Maurice Earls writes: Gaelic culture and society collapsed in Ireland from the late seventeenth century on following several centuries of attack and military defeat. Ancient mores, which had acted as a force for social cohesion and comprised a complex web of energies and values that gave meaning and form to life, faded away. For the…
Man is a Giddy Thing
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. And yet we go on making them, even in a field as volatile as electoral politics in its current phase seems to be. We have of course every right by now…
When Johnny Goes Marching
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 per cent of males in the northwest of Ireland are descendants of one individual (possibly Niall of the Nine Hostages) or, perhaps more likely, of a few closely related males…
Unionisms and Partition
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 McNeill published a book justifying partition under the title Ulster’s Stand for Union. When it was finally completed in February 1922, McNeill’s work amounted to the fullest attempt to date…
Aren’t we great?
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 enjoyed internationally is now slipping, one reason could be our perceived status as a tax haven. Given the benefits attached to having an attractive ‘brand’ as a nation, we might…
What’ll I read?
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.
Taking a Tumble
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.