Latest Blogs
Which Irish are You?
Brian M Walker writes: There is at present much interest in the Irish diaspora, with television programmes on the subject and a new five-year strategy planned by the government. Thirty years ago President Mary Robinson delivered her groundbreaking address on the Irish diaspora to the joint houses of the Oireachtas. She reminded us of the…
Eco and ‘American fascism’
Maurice Fitzpatrick writes: There is an urgent need for the US to evaluate the consequences of the full-scale assault on its democracy. One way to begin is to examine the alarming parallels in the US now with one of the most horrific periods of human history. Thirty years ago, in June 1995, Italian critic Umberto…
Prophet of a Coming Time
Fergus O’Ferrall writes: This year (and this day, August 6th) marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, the founding father of Irish democracy. The remarkable set of political principles enunciated by O’Connell, by which he sought to shape early Irish democratic practice, retain seminal significance for our democratic future in the twenty-first…
To the Edge
David O’Connor writes: The titles of Adrian Duncan’s novels tend to refer to work. Place of, time off, profession. Love Notes From a German Building Site; A Sabbatical in Leipzig; The Geometer Lobachevsky. Not so the recently published The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth – though it is, in the first of its two parts,…
Picture Perfect
Drew Basile writes: Susan Sontag writes in On Photography that ‘the practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera’. If photographs capture life, Sontag warns that they also flatten it. Mundane details transform into nuanced objects of aesthetic contemplation, but the real…
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…