The terrible events in Ukraine are evoking memories of the great famine of 1932-33, when up to three million Ukrainians were starved to death by Joseph Stalin’s deliberate policies. Ukrainians have a special word for that genocidal event – the Holdomor, or ‘terror famine’ – which bears some comparison to the Nazis’ Holocaust. I had…
Many strategic and political experts have described the tragic situation in Ukraine as a watershed in international affairs, and a quantum leap into a new world order. Alignments are changing, neutral countries – even Switzerland – are taking sides, and the European Union has moved swiftly to supply arms to defend Ukraine. In recent decades,…
I thought that the “handshake of peace”, which we used to exchange in pre-Covid times, was a lovely gesture during Mass. It was friendly, linking people together, and an expression of community. It was also egalitarian. You shook hands with whoever happened to be next to you in the pew, and, in busy city churches,…
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…