Latest Blogs
The Wars on Palestine
On May 22nd last, Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University gave a talk at Maynooth University (and at Trinity College the next day) entitled ‘The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine’. Khalidi, who is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, is a highly distinguished historian of the Middle East, with many books to…
An Unconsummated Affair
James Williams writes: The novelist Evelyn Waugh was perhaps the best known of the fugitives seeking shelter in Ireland from the socialist storm brought about by the election of a Labour government in Britain in 1945. Fresh from the popular and financial success of his threnody for the Anglo-Catholic aristocracy, Brideshead Revisited, Waugh was violently…
Victoria Amelina 1986-2023
Lia Mills writes: Victoria Amelina had a way of walking straight into your heart and making herself at home there. She had no time to waste; she was easy to love. Living the dangerous life of a war crimes researcher, gathering testimony from survivors of Russian atrocities in Ukraine and using her considerable intellectual and…
How to Disappear
Katrina Goldstone writes, In January 1987, Stella Jackson, who wrote under the pen name, Stella Fitzthomas Hagan, put a halt to her proposed memoir, declaring it unlikely she would ever manage to finish it. She had only reached the period of the late 1940s, in a life that would span from 1908 -1992. Despite her…
Emigrants and Émigrés
James Williams writes: In the years after World War Two, hundreds of thousands of Irish people migrated to Britain. In all, almost one in six of the population quit the country in the 1950s as Ireland shared with East Germany the unenviable distinction of being the only countries in Europe whose population declined over the…
Forgetting to Remember
Sean Byrne writes: In recent commemorations of the Civil War, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin have all accepted that atrocities were committed by both sides during that conflict. Yet none of those parties have mentioned the ruthless suppression by the new state of the struggles by workers to better their wretched conditions during…
The Songs Remain
Robin Wilkinson writes: When shooting In Bruges in 2008 the director did daily battle with the studio on matters from the storyboard to the lighting of individual scenes. He won that war and the resulting gem was very much his own, in every sense a Martin McDonagh film, as is The Banshees of Inisherin. Since…
Ronald Blythe: 1922-2023
Enda O’Doherty writes: Ronald Blythe, who died on January 14th aged one hundred, was best known for Akenfield, his study, published in 1969, of the life, over three generations, of an English village. Akenfield became an instant classic and was made into a film by Sir Peter Hall. The place Akenfield did not actually exist…
Dublin’s Medieval Core
Peter Sirr writes: Sir John Perrott decides to make a circuit of the walls of the city. It is 1585, he is the lord deputy of Ireland and thought to be a son of Henry VIII. In seven years’ time he will die in the Tower of London, convicted of treason. Fifteen years earlier he…
The Trials of the Red Prince
The presidential, and subsequent legislative, elections in France earlier this year told us a number of things about the changing nature of the nation’s politics. First, that the main contest is now, and has been since 2017, not that between left and right but that between centre and far right
The Dunmanway Killings
Brian M Walker writes: The recent TG4 documentary Marú in Iarthar Chorcaí (shown on December 7th) looked at the killings of thirteen civilians which occurred in West Cork in April 1922. The fact that all the victims were Protestant has drawn special attention to these events. The programme highlighted the controversy over the deaths. We…
The Killer and his Little Friend
A decade ago, Zakhar Prilepin was a Russian extremist, and the political party he belonged to was banned. These days he is the mainstream. Prilepin has not changed. Vladimir Putin has. When Putin’s pet project, the Kerch bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, was bombed and partially destroyed in October, the Russian political hardliner and Ukraine…