The View Many interesting books are being published around the centenary of partition and the border. The Irish civil war of 1922-23 – however painful at the time and long after – is now history. In his detailed, critical but also sympathetic book, A Difficult Birth: The Early Years of Northern Ireland 1920-25, Alan Parkinson…
The View Many problems in life arise from the habitual gap between ideals and realities. The Church knows this well, as it works at the coalface trying to bring into some harmony the ideal of a Christian life and a Christian society with the realities of personal sinfulness and sometimes dire societal failings. Churches are…
The View Some 150 years ago, on January 18, 1871 at Versailles, a united Germany came into being as an empire in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Reminders of it are low-key, confined to German newspapers and magazines. A thousand-year Reich had existed in the past, the Holy Roman Empire, that existed…
The View Who America’s leader is matters to people around the world. With President Joe Biden there is now a Christian gentleman in the White House, whose ambition after all the turmoil of recent times will be to do what is right, working as much as possible with others at home and abroad. If he…
The View Year’s end is a time, when newspapers publish archival documents that may reveal discreetly hidden or long forgotten aspects of governance. Representatives of public institutions, even students, should have some minimal knowledge of their history, to avoid unnecessarily raising ghosts of the past. The report in The Irish Catholic (November 26) that the…
The View November was the month the skies began to lift. In a year that for most people has been an endurance test there was some limited compensation in the fact that on average, despite incidents of flooding and high winds that brought trees down, the weather has been distinctly better than average, though not…
The View In 1838, the Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle Thomas Drummond delivered a magisterial rebuke to the landlords of the Tipperary Grand Jury agitating for greater security (including my great-great grandfather), by reminding them: “Property has its duties as well as its rights.” Today, public discourse generally tends to highlight people’s rights more than their…
The View Over 50 years, the work of peace and reconciliation in counteracting the ugly and protracted outbreak of violence has been facilitated by patient outreach and genuine effort at mutual understanding engaged in by Christians of different backgrounds. This has often involved painful and self-critical examination of the causes of conflict, where conflict itself…
The View Ireland is approaching the final phase of the decade of centenaries, commemorating events which led to a separate Irish state in parallel with the creation of Northern Ireland and partition and the fighting of a civil war over terms of the Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland. The decade of centenaries, which in…
The View A book that I treasure for many reasons is a Holy Bible given to me as a Christening present in 1947, and inscribed “to my godson Martin with affectionate greetings”. It is compact with a leather cover, and, despite being well thumbed, its 1,400 pages of thin but strong paper are very well preserved.…