Here is a book which will interest and delight those many viewers who have followed the career of one of the country’s leading broadcasters. Miriam O’Callaghan was born on January 6 at Cornelscourt, Co. Dublin. Her father was a civil servant, her mother was a teacher. Miriam attended St Brigid’s, the local national school in which…

Biographers are usually so busy investigating other people’s lives, as to pay little attention to their own. However, in this revealing book Anne Chambers recounts some of her experiences as a biographer, providing interesting sidelights on Irish writing and publishing. As an account of a long career by a non-fiction writer, it is a rare…

The completion and inauguration of a cathedral is a rare event in modern Europe. Yesterday the Pope was in Barcelona to inaugurate the cathedral of the Holy Family on the centenary of the death of its architect Antoni Gaudi. These two books provide two contrasting biographies for readers. Peter Stanford,  a well known British Catholic…

There are many contested happenings in Irish history – invasion, the conflicts over land, religious hegemony, secularism, the liberal ethic. One that still raises passions and evokes strong opinions is the nature and place of conversionism, or proselytism, in the Irish story. It hits at the heart of who today’s Irish think they are. It…

Mary Kennelly’s first collection, Sunny Spells, Scattered Showers was published in 2004. Since then subsequent books have appeared from a number of Irish publishers. On the Wind and the Singing Tide is her first collection from Salmon Poetry, “one of the most consequential houses in the Irish literary world in the last half century” according…

There are two parts in this book. The first part is a history of the Newell family. The second is a collection of short stories written by Máirtín Ó Tnúthail, one of the most distinguished members of that family, under the nomme de plume ‘Dermot L. Martyn’. These were written in the decades after World…

Some weeks ago, a weekend paper carried a large notice of an art auction due to be held on May 25 in Dublin. One of the pictures caught my wife’s eye: it was a familiar yet different image, a version in water colour of the large oil painting ‘Mass in a Connemara Cottage’ by Aloysius…

How is Catholicism to remain relevant in an increasingly secular society? That is the question which the French priest-writer Jean Sulivan (1913-1980) grappled with in his writings, and it lies at the heart of this study of Sulivan by the distinguished Franco-Irish scholar, Eamon Maher. Jean Sulivan was the pseudonym of Joseph Lemarchand, a native…

Our history is full of untold and almost unknown lives. Twenty-five years ago, while researching a book on the Royal Irish Constabulary, I first got to know something about Tom Hughes (b. February 1, 1891). He was one of the constables in Listowel barracks in June 1920 when the British government declared Munster to be…

In his brief life Donal Walsh came to the attention of the nation through an appearance on The Saturday Night Show. Donal was, as he said himself, a sports mad Kerry boy, who was struck by cancer, not once but twice, the second time mortally. He was quite a normal boy, so one is not…