Latest Blogs
Inscribing Time
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: Writing mainly of animals and artefacts, local history and local weather, Moya Cannon may nevertheless be ranked among the great love poets of this island. Her work expresses kinship with a world it feels impelled to examine in detail, embodying, in its limpid, exploring flow, an openness to manifold life –…
The Trondheim Allinghams
David Toms writes: If the port city of Trondheim in Norway seems remote today it is because we have become so used to travelling over land or by air rather than by waterways. In the age of sail, Trondheim, like other such cities, was deeply connected to all parts of Europe and beyond into the…
Trump, Harvard, Free Speech
Kevin Stevens writes: I play pickleball several times a week at the YMCA in Central Square, Cambridge, a short walk from Harvard University. A cohort of thirty to forty of us play, and the group is a cross-section of the cosmopolitan Cambridge community. We run in age from fifteen to eighty-five. We are students, working…
The Value of a Life
Ryan Breeden writes: In March 2018, members of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) presented a formal ‘inquiry’ about the number of migrant families producing children with severe disabilities based on the alleged prevalence of incestuous marriages. The reaction to this almost word-for-word reworking of older antisemitic tropes about Jews and disability provoked swift public…
Lines of Vision
Ben Keatinge writes: The Amergin Step is a book with many tributaries from the fields of archaeology, myth, folklore, history and literature, but perhaps its unifying principle is that of vision, its way of seeing and interpreting landscape, specifically the Iveragh peninsula in south Kerry. Paddy Bushe has been exploring Iveragh through the eyes and…
Unbreakable Ukraine
Rosemary Jenkinson writes: April 23rd, 2025: This is my sixth trip to Ukraine and I’ve come to gauge the mood of the people during the US-led peace negotiations. All through the night the bus passes town squares with displays of dead soldiers in darkness. Historical buildings are barely lit, trying not to draw attention to …
We Have History
Neasa MacErlean writes: It is only a hundred years since most leading British historians regarded Ireland as a country with no history. That was to change within a couple of decades, but those years in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s were unstable ones, and the struggle to demonstrate Ireland’s historical character took place against a…
A ‘Red’ in St Peter’s
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…
An Irreplaceable Voice
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…
A Strange Affair
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…
Mapping the Civil War
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…
The Walnut Tree
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…