Search and Rescue. True Stories of Irish Air-Sea Rescues and the Loss of R116 Lorna Siggins (Merrion Press, Price €16.95) Lorna Siggins’s update of her book Mayday, Mayday, covers the huge expansion of Ireland’s air-sea rescue services since 2004. The time when mariners in distress off our coasts were almost entirely dependent on the Royal Air Force when a…
Last week saw the 100th anniversary of the start of Ireland’s Civil War. It’s not something most of us would want to celebrate, but it’s appropriate to mark or commemorate it – it was a significant event that we can still learn from, and an event that, unbelievably, still influences our politics today. It’s a…
Nobody expected The Railway Children to capture the public imagination the way it did in 1970. Films about displaced children in wartime usually go down well (especially if they’re tearjerkers, as this was) but its appeal went off-the-scale. People were still talking about it half a century later. It makes you wonder why they took…
Dear England: Finding Hope, Taking Heart and Changing the World by Stephen Cottrell (Hodder Faith, €11.50/£9.99) This little book, by the Anglican Archbishop of York, might provide an object lesson to some Irish Catholic bishops. It is basically a letter answering a query to him by a complete stranger: ‘What made you become a priest?’ He…
Ireland and Argentina in the twentieth century: Diaspora, diplomacy, dictatorship, Catholic mission and the Falklands crisis by Dermot Keogh (Cork University Press, €39.00/£33.50) Of all the countries of South America, Argentina is the one with which Ireland has the most historic and ethnic connections. One has only to think of William Brown from Foxford, who…
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the city through James Joyce’s Dublin: an exhibition created by Freddie Phillipson, in collaboration with Drawing Matter Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Mondays to Fridays, 9am -5pm, runs to August 19. The centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses passed this year with a few serious…
The overdue and historical overturning of the Roe vs Wade decision in the US blew up in the media last Friday. The development was portrayed mostly as a bad thing, with some over-reactions downright apocalyptic. With a greater or lesser degree of subtlety presenters and interviewers showed where they stood and it was overwhelmingly pro-choice/pro-abortion.…
Despite the wretched Covid-19 causing the cancellation of a number of events at the National Concert Hall and other venues across the country, I am hoping the upcoming collaboration between Irish National Opera (INO) and Dublin’s Bord Gáis Energy Theatre (BGET) will proceed with its scheduled performances of Puccini’s Tosca at the BGET on July…
The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies by Irving Finkel (Hodder & Stoughton, £25.00/€29.99) This is a fascinating yet grim book which describes in detail the beliefs of the cultures of Mesopotamia concerning the departed dead. The author, who is the senior assistant keeper at the British Museum, is in charge of the written relics…
Thomas Morrissey SJ The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland by Crawford Gribben (Oxford University Press, £25.00/€29.00) The author has produced a readable and impressive work of scholarship and organisation, which endeavours to trace the rise and fall of religion in Ireland from 8,000BC to the present day. The advent and progress of Christianity is presented…
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone
Peter Costello