This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the untimely death of Hollywood queen Frances Gumm, better known as Judy Garland. Perhaps most famous for her character Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Garland is less known for the trail of destruction which marked her off-screen life. Judy died from an accidental drug overdose in 1969 […]
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 […]
The veritable nail has been hammered into the coffin of Irish TV comedy with RTE’s newest attempt to pander to the cultural Zeitgeist. If you haven’t seen ‘Comedy Showcase’, don’t bother. It’s dreadful. After watching one clip of ‘Bump’ I couldn’t help but wonder- what the hell happened in the seven years since The Savage […]
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. George Orwell, 1984 The recommendation of the National Council for Curriculum Assessment that the teaching of history remain an optional subject for the Junior Cert hardly came as a surprise. Anyone who read the 2016 NCCA background […]
The January sun was shining on Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square as I walked by small piles of scrabbling pigeons, passed the gleaming white Obelisk of Theodosius, and headed through the metal detector that guards the door of the Turkish-Islamic Arts Museum. It is a long building of rose-colored brick and stone, fronted by a row of […]
1971 was a key year in the struggle by the Catholic nationalist population of the North of Ireland for democratic rights. A moderate campaign for basic democratic provisions had begun in the early 1960s and grew to be a mass movement led by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (founded in 1967). It had provoked […]
The definition of mercy killing is very elastic, as two recent cases in England demonstrate. In the first, 53-year-old Robert Knight was given a two-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty to the manslaughter of his mother, 79-year-old June. June had Alzheimer’s disease and was being given end-of-life care in a nursing home. Robert found his mother’s suffering […]
The faith is booming as fast as the domestic economy, and the young outnumber older people in the pews. On a dark, bitterly cold night in Reykjavik this winter, worshippers were scattered in pews for evening Mass at the Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King, an eye-catching local landmark in the western section of Iceland’s […]
Actor Brad Pitt has said that he “clings to religion” in an interview with GQ magazine. The star of the newly-released Ad Astra said that he had “gone through everything” in searching for connection. “Like, I cling to religion,” he said. “I grew up with Christianity. Always questioned it, but it worked at times,” he told GQ. […]
A Malawi Chief has won a Leadership in Public Life Award for her work to end child marriages and ensure young girls stay in school. Chief Theresa Kachindamoto, a Ngoni traditional leader, received a Leadership in Public Life Award at the 16th Annual Vital Voices Global Partnership Award Ceremony in Washington, D.C. this month, in recognition […]
For months now, the world has been transfixed by the stunning images streaming out of Hong Kong. There are photographs showing endless masses of people packing the streets, lit up by the omni-present cellphone screens glowing in the darkness, videos of masked young men pulling down facial recognition towers and flashing laser pointers at the police to […]
There are now just a handful of people left alive who knew Laura Ingalls Wilder, and William Turner, the former chairman of the Great Southern Bank, is one of them. After stumbling across his name in Caroline Fraser’s powerful new biography Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I called the bank in Mansfield […]