Category: Books

Giving thought to the possible future

Dreaming a New Dream: Conversations on the future of the Church in Ireland, by Jim Deeds, with a foreword by Julieann Moran (Messenger Publications, €9.95 / £8.95) The pastoral minister Jim Deeds will be familiar to many readers as the co-author with Brendan McManus of  Discovering God in the Mess and its two follow-up titles. This is…

Sing in the Quiet Places of my Heart: The Life and Works of WM Letts (1882-1972), by Bairbre  O’Hogan (South Dublin Libraries,  €20.00 /  £16.99); available  through Alan Hanna and other retailers. J. Anthony Gaughan Winifred Letts is one of those many poets of the Irish Literary Revival, once widely admired, who lead a fugitive…

An Honours List for Ireland?

Since the founding of the state in 1922 the question of a sort of Order of Merit, a Legion d’Honneur,  or even a Presidential Medal of Freedom (a successor to the Presidential Medal of Honour) in the USA, has been much debated. The Constitution does not allow  the awarding of any title of nobility, and…

Echoes of the past from the National Archives  2024 A son of Israel as Dublin’s Lord Mayor

  The sudden decision of the government of Israel to close its embassy in Ballsbridge because of, so the government in Jerusalem claimed, the outright  “anti-Semitism” of the Irish government brings archive files relating to Robert Briscoe (dating from 1944 and 1955) in the latest release into focus, which suggest that the Netanyahu  government’s  grasp…