Shadow Warriors: The Irish Army Ranger Wing by Paul O’Brien and Wayne Fitzgerald Mercier Press (€12.99/£11.99) Joe Carroll Back in the 1980s, there used to be an advertisement on RTÉ showing a squad of soldiers in battledress, holding rifles jogging along a road while singing lustily: “We are Rangers, mighty, mighty Rangers.” And then the Rangers…
At the end of every year I look back to see what outstanding religious programmes were broadcast on mainstream media and usually there’s not a huge lot, but last week there was one strong contender. Priest School (BBC Two, Tuesday) was an endearing insight into the training of priests in the Scottish College in Rome.…
Irish Jesuits in Penal Times: Thomas Betagh and his Companions by Thomas J. Morrissey SJ (Messenger Publications, €19.95) In what is now called St Kevin’s Park in Dublin’s Camden Row, just off Camden Street, which was once a graveyard dating from medieval times, there stands a monument. It is to the Jesuit Fr John Austin, who…
Without a Dog’s Chance: The Nationalists of Northern Ireland and the Irish Boundary Commission 1920–1922 by James A. Cousins (Irish Academic Press 2020) In July 1925, nearly a full century ago, the Irish Boundary Commission sat for the last time, bringing to an end a sorry business that began badly and ended in confusion. It may…
There was some low level controversy in the media late last week relating to the death toll due to Covid-19 – was it 1,700 or was it 1,200? Important to get the facts right of course, at the same time a much higher death toll barely caused a ripple – the 6,666 unborn babies who…
In my previous column, I left Charles Villiers Stanford as deputy organist of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1873. He was promoted the following year but before accepting the principal post stipulated that he be allowed to study in Germany during the next two summers. Cambridge agreed and Stanford went to Leipzig. It didn’t work well.…
The World of Books By the books editor In recent months people have been forced for reasons of social solidarity to work from home, rather than make what was for many a two-hour drive to work and another two hours home. But this working from home, feared at first, has worked out well. Working from…
Jesus Through Muslim Eyes by Richard Shumack (SPCK, £12.99) The other day, before I started on Jesus Through Muslim Eyes, I read in a 1957 book of travels through North Africa from Tunis to Cairo that in Beja, a remote village near the Libyan-Tunisian border, the mosque was dedicated to Jesus Christ. It surprised the author…
The Museum Building of Trinity College: A Model of Victorian Craftsmanship by Christine Casey and Patrick Wyse Jackson (Four Courts Press, €45) Christopher Moriarty Now is a fitting time to browse an extraordinary book about an extraordinary building. Created in 1857, the Museum Building of Trinity College, Dublin has been a familiar object to generations of…
Really Rotten Rhymes poems by Gabriel Fitzmaurice, illustrations by Alice Coleman (Mercier Press, €14.99/£13.99) This is a book filled with the rude vitality of childhood, with equal measures of both qualities. It makes a wonderful read for those who have children still around them, or can remember anything at all of their own early years. This…
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello