Before Mike Nesbitt entered politics, he was an accomplished journalist, respected for his forensic skills on live radio. “He was a rottweiler,” recalled one former colleague. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be interrogated by him.” Now it is Nesbitt, the Health Minister, who must come up with the answers.And it would appear he is more…
With a kind of modest defiance, the leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, raised, in his right hand, the wood of blackened oak, a cross that was no doubt hidden, many times, under a sleeve or below a floorboard. The penal cross was 300 years old, and, though light as a feather, carried the…
Folklore promises that those who perish on the hill at Saul, Co. Down, will skip purgatory and go straight to Heaven. After all, it was here that St Patrick himself ended his days on March 17, 461AD. But the legend was not what drew the parish priest there as he marked his 75th birthday. Rather,…
An obscure border village in South Armagh has just received some famous visitors: St Paul the Apostle, St Teresa of Avila and St Agnes, among others. Actually, it was their relics that visited Meigh, a little village which rests in the shadow of Slieve Gullion. It was here that Shalom World TV decided, apparently for…
I have learned a new word in time for the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, the leader of Catholic emancipation: eleutherophilia. It means a passion for liberty; but the term can also refer to a mental disorder: a manic or mad irresistible craving for freedom. This mania – a dangerous belief that…
It was once known as Vinegar Hill, or Little Dublin, a colonial outpost settled by Irish immigrants, fleeing the famine. Having carried their faith and their culture to what is now the village of Markham, Ontario, Canada, these Irish men and women built a little Catholic church in 1862 on Rouge Street. They named it…
My friend’s son worked for a while as a tour guide in the Titanic Quarter of Belfast. Two Americans got off the bus in the dockland area and were quite perplexed: “But where is the Titanic?” they wanted to know. They were genuinely shocked to hear it had sunk. The Titanic looms large in Belfast,…
Almost a century ago, his great great grandfather donated the land for the national monument to St Patrick at Saul, Co. Down. And now, his namesake, Thomas John Hampton is set to become the first priest in four decades to be ordained in the parish of Saul, the place where St Patrick began his mission…
The monsignor, with a global mission linked to Blessed Carlo Acutis, had just departed County Down when the news was announced last Friday: the young Italian would be canonised in Rome on September 7. Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo – himself no stranger to headlines due to the saga of Cardinal Ted McCarrick – had been in…
I was covering the peace process, in the days before the Good Friday Agreement was forged, there was a lot of talk about a ‘Pan-Nationalist Front’. It was a unionist term for an alliance forged by the Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, SDLP leader John Hume, and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to pursue a peace settlement. It’s…