Irish bishops travel to meet Pope Francis filled with hope and realism, writes Archbishop Eamon Martin This weekend the Irish bishops travel to Rome to begin a two-week pilgrimage “to the threshold of the apostles” (ad limina apostolorum). It is 10 years now since the Irish bishops were last called to make their ad limina…

Dr Kevin Myers Most Irish people continue to believe in life after death but many don’t see the Church as the only path to salvation, writes Dr Kevin Myers “Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” Penned by John Donne, this sonnet verse proclaims man’s…

Echoes of the past from the achives Peter Costello reports from the National Archives of Ireland on the release under the 30-year rule of confidential state files from 1986 This week the National Archives released for public inspection State files from 1986 and earlier. This year some files date back to the 1920s, with large…

Echos of the past from the Archives In 1971 a proposal was made by the manager of Muckross House in Killarney that an effort should be made to ensure the return to its place of creation of the manuscript of the Annals of Inisfallen. The book had been created around 1092, with entries from 433…

Secret of the powers that be This year saw the release of a backlog of files of various kinds going back to the 1920s. Many dealt with dismissals from the public service, the army, the guards, and the civil service generally. Most of these reveal little stories of incompetence and misbehaviour as often as not…

Secret of the powers that be In 1977 Seán MacBride was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. An invitation was extended to the members of the cabinet, including the Minster of Foreign Affairs, to attend the award ceremony on 20 September. This posed the government with a problem. MacBride had been awarded the Nobel Prize in…

Secrets of the powers that be “Some people seem to like giving interviews.” These were the words typed on a card from the Pontifical Council for the Family in Rome. It was sent on January 2, 1986 to Geoffrey Keating, the Irish Chargé d’Affaires in Rome, by Monsignor Diarmuid Martin (as the present Archbishop of…

Secret of the powers that be Over the last 30 years the Islamic presence in Dublin has grown. I wrote about this then about in my book Dublin Churches, for the only mosque on the North Circular Road was making use of a former Presbyterian church. The first Muslim presence was due to Malayan medical…

Echoes of the past from the archives When one reads in a newspaper that ‘a source close to the Minister says’, this can be taken to mean that the Minister himself has been speaking to the correspondent ‘off the record’. Such background briefs are better known as ‘ministerial leaks’ and at time they are the…

The first manned mission to land on the moon in July 1969 was controlled by a tiny computer. It had approximately 64Kbyte of memory, and was more basic than the electronics in modern toasters that have computer controlled stop/start/defrost buttons. Today electronic media of many kinds and full scale computerisation in all areas of life…