Two highlights of trad every year are the Patrick O’Keefe Festival in the heart of Sliabh Luachra, and Oireachtas na Gaeilge which celebrates the most beautiful of Irish singing, amhránaíocht ar an sean-nós, in a weekend of competitions and recitals each year. This year, along with everything else in these beleaguered times, both festivals are taking place […]
PODCAST: Listen to John Aidan Byrne, Irish commentator based in New York, interview Viktor Shvets on his new book, the Great Rupture Viktor Shvets’ medicine for overcoming our greatest financial challenge in decades – record global debt – is daring and controversial: Forget about repaying the massive bill of as much as […]
Every parent knows the feeling. Your child is crying and wants to go home, you pick them up to comfort them and move faster, your arms tired with a long walk ahead – but you cannot stop now. Now add to this a slick mud surface and a range of hungry predators around you. That […]
“Come on, he cried, come show your hand you, have boasted for so long How you could crush this rebel band with your armies great and strong ‘No surrender’ was his cry, and ever no retreat Brave Tracey cried before he died shot down in Talbot Street” ‘Seán Treacy’ by Dominic Behan This week […]
PODCAST: Listen to John Aidan Byrne, Irish commentator based in New York, interview Rod Dreher on his new book As a new left-wing cultural revolution takes to the streets and seizes control of American institutions, Rod Dreher renews the great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s stirring call to “live not by lies” – that […]
September 21 passed without special notice, as usual, this year. Perhaps, in future, that day might be remembered as Zdenek Hanzlik Day. Or, to make it easier on our clumsy tongues, we could call it Sid’s Day — that being the name by which the 60-year-old, originally from the Czech Republic, was always known in […]
David Burke’s Deception and Lies: the hidden History of the Arms Crisis 1970 is probably one of the worst books written about the seismic events that took place fifty years ago around the alleged plot to import arms to defend northern Catholics, particularly in Belfast where loyalist and RUC attacks had led to the displacement […]
“Clontarf was too important to be left to the historians, so passed into the legend-maker’s hand.” Gwyn Jones, “A History of the Vikings” Written around 1280, “Njál’s Saga” is an Icelandic tale of vengeance and blood feuds among various groups of Vikings. It also includes a section on the Battle of Clontarf in Ireland and […]
Anyone who loves Dickens’ novels will always be curious to learn more about his life. They ponder: what lies behind the extraordinary universe that sprang from one man’s mind? Where did he find the sources of his inspiration? Indeed, what kind of man was he? A.N. Wilson does not disappoint. A writer who has published […]
Earlier this year, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, travelled back to his home in Bavaria to visit his ailing older brother, shortly before the latter died. It was an onerous and poignant journey and he contacted shingles on his return. While intellectually alert, at 93 years of age, he is inevitably frail. Indeed, […]
One dreamed as a girl of being a teacher, playing the role so accurately she created field trip permission slips for her friends’ parents to sign. Another was a born performer, always thrust to the microphone by her friends. Still another had regular dinners with royalty, serving an elaborate feast created by mud. A brand-new […]
For a man who breathed his last at the young age of 46, Eric Arthur Blair — better known as George Orwell — had an almost unparalleled impact on the Anglosphere. The journalist, novelist, and diarist has been read by generations of schoolchildren, and his name is incessantly invoked by politicians from all sides of […]