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...
Aug 3, 2017 | Latest
Found two gems in the Oxfam shop in Belfast’s Ann Street, which I’ve read before, but I bought them anyway to give to friends. John Banville’s The Book of Evidence is probably his best, in my opinion, based on a real life crime in Dublin in 1982. But the other book is...
Aug 2, 2017 | Features
Just received the clar for this August’s Féile na bhFlaitheartach 2017. The theme this year is ‘The O’Flahertys, Ireland and the Russian Revolution’. The programme has a great cover! A facsimile of the novel The Informer which was published in Moscow and Leningrad in...
Jul 23, 2017 | Latest
George McCool was captured by German soldiers at Dunkirk. Twenty years ago, I interviewed the Derry man at his home in the Waterside. George, a Catholic unionist, who described himself as ‘a bit of a royalist’, incredibly, lived in Derry’s Creggan throughout the...
Jul 16, 2017 | Features
In 2002 I interviewed David Ervine about peace, identity and compromise. It was just after a biography of Ervine, Unchartered Waters by Henry Sinnerton, had been published by Brandon (which also published Gerry Adams’ books). Ervine died ten years ago and the...
