Following a Catholic uprising in 1641, Cromwell and the New Model Army set sail to Ireland to defeat this coalition and reclaim Ireland for parliament. This proved to be a bloody and brutal affair, forever remembered for a series of controversial massacres. The Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland had begun, which included the destruction of Drogheda […]
What to say about Unplanned? Admittedly I went in expecting to like it, but that did not prepare me for the film’s exceptional emotional power, one of a fairly small number of films that have brought tears to my eyes. Yet you may not have heard of it. To say it does not appear to […]
A resolution of the European Parliament recognizes that the two totalitarian regimes of the 20th century were twin in crimes against humanity. Someone needs to tell Beijing.
ON THIS DAY: 8TH OCTOBER 1974: SEÁN MACBRIDE became the first Irish person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize MacBride was born in Paris in 1904 and remained ther until his father’s execution after the Easter Rising of 1916, when he was sent to school at Mount St Benedict’s, Gorey. In 1919, aged 15, […]
Pádraic Ó Conaire was an Irish writer who wrote extensively in the Irish Language and wrote 26 books, 473 stories, 237 essays and 6 plays. His acclaimed novel Deoraíocht has been described by Angela Bourke as ‘the earliest example of modernist fiction in Irish’. Orphaned by the age of eleven, he spent a period living […]
In today’s sex-soaked media, it was gratifying to see a leading champion of unrestricted sexual freedom, the New York Times, going bonkers about the wickedness of pornography. The headline summarises its graphic, scrupulously researched and highly disturbing article: “The Internet Is Overrun With Images of Child Sexual Abuse. What Went Wrong?” The figures it cites are […]
The Orient Express departs on its first official journey from Paris to Instanbul; It was a long-distance passenger train service created in 1883 by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL). It’s routes changed many times with several routes in the past concurrently used the Orient Express name, or slight variations. Although the original Orient Express […]
This Bloomberg piece about Japan’s rural depopulation is very interesting. And since it is not only interesting but also about demography, it seems perfect to share with you, the readers of the Demography is Destiny blog. As we have often said before, Japan is the canary in the demographic coalmine, the country that the rest of the world is […]
Ten IRA and INLA hunger-strikers die between 5 May and 12 August; all but one of the men were in their twenties, the youngest, Thomas McElwee, being 23 years of age. The hunger strike had started on March 1st 1981 after years of the prisoners being on the blanket (blanket protest) and the failure of […]
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” These were the spirited words of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg in her address last week to the United Nations. Miss Thunberg’s claim that we are “in the beginning […]
Chronic loneliness is an increasing concern, and apparently not just among the elderly and social-media crazed millennials. A recently released YouGov survey finds that almost one in five men in the UK say that they have no close friends. The findings also show that men generally lead more solitary lives than women, who appear to be better at […]
The Whiteboys (na Buachaillí Bána) were a secret Irish agrarian organisation which defended tenant farmer land rights for subsistence farming. They sought to address rack-rents, tithe collection, excessive dues, evictions and other oppressive acts. As a result they targeted landlords and tithe collectors. Their operations were chiefly in the counties of Waterford, Cork, Limerick, and […]