How nice to see – now that restrictions are lifting – couples returning to their wedding plans, which so many put on hold during the course of the pandemic. And although church weddings have fallen in Ireland, they haven’t fallen at all as much as in neighbouring nations. Fewer than a quarter of weddings in…
Even leaving aside the Catholic Church (and up until 1995, the Irish electorate) few institutions have been as opposed to divorce during the 20th Century as the British royal family. King George V, monarch at the time of the foundation of the Irish State (and of the Stormont parliament), would not receive divorcés at court.…
There has been so much focus on James Joyce’s Ulysses – published on February 2, 1922 – that some readers and viewers of public media complain they’re being “force fed” Joyce’s famous oeuvre. And some find the depictions of masturbation, to say the least, unedifying. Well, Ulysses certainly was almost universally regarded as a ‘dirty…
Shock and horror were expressed in high places. Indignant denials were issued. The establishment came forth to state that such a thing, were it to happen, would be outrageous. Such was the general reaction at Westminster to the claim by a former minister, Ms Nusrat Ghani, that she had been reprimanded for her “Muslimness”. Allegation…
The murder of Ashling Murphy was so atrocious, so shocking, so extremely distressing in every way that it was understandable that, immediately, both politicians and people sought to apply blame. Some specific individual is to blame – the person who carried out this brutal and unspeakable crime – but in the immediate aftermath, since there…
I don’t know whether Kate Hoey intended to be offensive when she claimed – in effect – that Nationalists/Catholics were now hogging too many of the jobs and influential positions in Northern Ireland, but that was how some people interpreted it, and offence was taken. It can be analysed as a significant social commentary on…
The French Catholic sociologist Olivier Roy has pointed that many previous concepts of ‘sin’ and ‘transgression’ have been transferred, in modern secular states, to the law, and are re-classified as ‘crimes’. A vivid example arises with the new proposed Scottish law against ‘hate crimes’, due to come into force this year. To hate someone, to…
A former Labour MP, in Britain, Ann Keen, certainly achieved a personal and political goal this past year of 2021. She succeeded in getting the Westminster government to announce an inquiry into forced adoptions in Britain between the 1950s and the 1970s. Mrs Keen, former parliamentary secretary to Gordon Brown, has also called for an official…
Yes, for some people it looks as though it might be an austere, even a lonely and isolating Christmas. I’m not a fan of some of these State-imposed restrictions occasioned by what seems to me an over-interpretation of health measures; but, as realists say nowadays, it is what it is. And you can never beat…
We can expect the literary focus of 2022 to be the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses: but an equally important milestone, especially for Christians, was the appearance of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922. This long poem burst upon the world with considerable fanfare, as Eliot’s biographer Richard Ellmann put it,…