Ahead of Ireland’s referendum on the subject of extending marriage rights to same-sex couples, Una Mullally charts the development of the movement, one of the most rapid and transformative changes in Irish society over the last century, from its origins to the present day.
Almost 58 million Brazilians voted for President Jair Bolsonaro, a man who never hid his nastiness, illiberalism, backwardness and general political ignorance. There are many ways of studying ‘bolsonarismo’, but one of the simplest is just to let him and his cronies speak.
A hundred years ago this month Yeats published ‘The Second Coming’ in an American magazine. The poem, Joe Cleary argues, did not wait to reflect calmly on rupture and crisis but swallowed them hot. Art does not brood on historical events but aspires itself to be the event. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.
Donald Trump’s exit is gratifying. The United States will now have a president who is decent, civil and honest. However, in a political society which has never been more divided and in which citizens have this year bought 17 million guns, uniting the people will not be easy.
I have met people, including some of my friends and their teenage children, who were proud to say, after the terrorist attacks, that they were definitely ‘not Charlie’. Many indeed felt that the cartoons led to Islamophobia and were an elitist insult to an oppressed and powerless minority.
Seamus Heaney pays tribute to a man beloved by his friends for his originality as a poet, his acuity as a critic, his probity and courage and merriment.
George Orwell taught us how to detect cant and doublespeak. He also had some views on language that would do credit to a retired colonel in Tunbridge Wells.
Just over a decade ago, Jane Clarke was a little-known newcomer to the Irish poetry scene. Today she is one of its most dependable talents. She is studious and industrious, a crafter of gleaming songlines with clipped, shimmering rectangles of illumination on the page. Her new book, ‘Coracle’, is a gathering up of style and strength.
Paul Doolan writes: Walter Benjamin took his own life at the age of 48. He wrote in his suicide note: ‘I am dying in a village where no one has ever heard of me.’ Had he survived and become an exile in New York, who knows? Perhaps the words ‘no one has ever heard of me’ would still ring true. Living might have proven to be a bad career move.
Kieran Fionn Murphy writes: Depictions of type 2 diabetes remain virtually absent from English-language novels, even though 589 million people worldwide have the disease. A mere mention of a character with type 2 diabetes who isn’t feckless, gluttonous, evil or dissolute, even as an aside, could help a vast, marginalised population feel recognised.
David William Sheehan writes: I learned to read power from a puppet throwing toast. Most afternoons of my Irish childhood ended in front of The Den with Zig and Zag, two aliens on a couch, telling each other and occasionally the nation to feck off.
Jonathan Becker writes: When I was packing up my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago after she died, I found an unusual book among her otherwise conventional collection: Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’. It was many years later that I would learn the book’s significance.
John Simmons writes: Is Homer the most influential writer of all time? We don’t know much about whoever he, she or they might have been, and we don’t know with any certainty how old the Iliad and the Odyssey are. They brought us the power of storytelling, and for that we should give them the highest praise.
Rosemary Jenkinson writes: On April 16th, 2026 at 3 am I’m on the sleeper train to Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine when there is a loud rap on our four-berth compartment door.
Michael Laver writes: Andy Burnham’s resounding defeat of the upstart right-wing Reform Party in the recent Makerfield byelection throws some light on the seemingly inexorable decline of ‘legacy’ parties on the centre right and centre left.
Mike Gogan writes on Bloomsday: ‘Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.’ This is one of quite a few yeses in the last paragraphs of ‘The Dead’, the final short story in ‘Dubliners’ by James Joyce. In ‘Ulysses’, which was written after, the last word of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy faintly echoes this, ‘Yes’.