Latest Blogs
Reading the Mind of War
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…
An Independent Initiative
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…
Not Mentioning Appeasement
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…
Slow March to Peace
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…
The West and the Rest
John Fanning writes: Trump 2 arrives at a time when a new world order, or disorder, as it has been called, is already well under way. If Britain ruled the waves, and a good part of the land, in the nineteenth century and America took over the reins in the twentieth we now seem to…
Sorry, No Houses
Maurice Earls writes: Eoghan Murphy, former housing minister and once the most unpopular man in Ireland, has recently published a political memoir. The purpose is to give his side of the story and let the world know that he is a decent human being who did his best in an impossible situation and that after…
Boston Diary
James Moran writes: In November 2008 I was in New York City when Barack Obama was elected. The city felt absolutely electric. I can remember so clearly how, the day after the result, a young man serving sandwiches in a coffee shop dropped absolutely all of the behavioural codes of New York when I ordered…
Firing up the Crazies
Frank Freeman writes: I want to say to Trump supporters: ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t vote for a man who mocks handicapped people, who calls dead veterans “suckers and losers”, who says if you’re rich and famous you can sexually assault women and they won’t do anything about it, who sleeps with a porn star…
The Monster in your Pocket
John Fanning writes: During the last decade there has been widespread coverage of survey results and medical reports dealing with an increase in mental health issues among young people, or Gen Z as the headline writers prefer. Little surprise then that a substantial new book on the subject, The Anxious Generation, by social psychologist and…
Egocide and the Self
Eilís Ward writes: In his essay on ideas of selfhood and egocide in philosophical thought (Dublin Review of Books, Autumn 2024), Joseph Rivera asks why my book Self takes a leap from critique of neoliberal selfhood to Buddhist accounts of the same. A large part of the answer comes from my years teaching politics in…
Waking the Dead
Patrick J Duffy writes: Michelle McGoff-McCann suggests that the role of the coroner as a ‘figure of authority’ in a modernising Ireland after the Famine has been underestimated. Her study highlights the significance of the coroner as a uniquely independent county official in local and legal administrative history throughout the nineteenth century. She also highlights…
One Hand Clapping
Michael J Farrell writes: As I was edging up to middle age, a variety of circumstances landed me at the University of Southern California learning how to write a novel. Scores of students, many recovering from the ecstatic sixties, had descended on Stephen Longstreet’s class. This man seemed to know every word ever written in…