Aug 30, 2017 | Features
Finished reading again, for the third time, one of my favourite novels, Staying On by Paul Scott. It was published in 1977 (when it won the Booker Prize), a year before Scott’s death at the age of fifty seven from colon cancer. Set in 1972 it tells the story of...
Aug 21, 2017 | Features
Every now and then you come across an Irish novel where the language and the storytelling are in such harmony as to reach the pitch of perfection. The writing is fluent and confident and you bond immediately with the story from the first page, entering into the...
Aug 15, 2017 | Features
Writing in today’s Irish Times Fintan O’Toole attacks Gerry Adams for accurately quoting the Belfast Agreement. Fintan is concerned to emphasise that even if a majority in favour of unity emerges in the North it will still have to get past a referendum in the...
Aug 8, 2017 | Features
On this day in 1971 the British army and the RUC were preparing for tomorrow’s dawn raids into nationalist areas across the North, to make arrests, interrogate and intern hundreds of people even though all of the first fatalities and bombings of the Troubles/Conflict...
Aug 7, 2017 | Features
Last month, a new documentary film, In the Name of Peace: John Hume in America, was shown at the 29th Galway Film Fleadh. Subsequent discussions resulted in some SDLP members and supporters resorting to an old refrain that Sinn Féin had written John Hume out of recent...
