The Rivers of Dublin, new revised edition by Clair L. Sweeney, revised by Gerard O’Connell & Michael Curtis (Dublin City Council / Irish Academic Press, €24.99) There is a lovely saying, by an unidentified street poet, that has long echoed in my mind, as a description of the modern city: “The fields lie dreaming underneath.” No…
After criticising Damian Thompson’s execrable spectator.co.uk podcast about the referendum in a recent Web Watch, it seems only fair to point to a far better spectator.co.uk piece on the referendum this week. ‘What really happened in Ireland’s abortion referendum’, a ‘Coffee House’ column by Wicklow-born but London-based Melanie McDonagh is marked, as perhaps inevitable nowadays,…
Some of you will be glad I’m not going to spend a full column on the referendum but I have to say I write this part with a heavy heart, a sense of bereavement at having lost something special, a sense of dread for the little lives that will be lost under our shiny new…
Why We Go to Mass, a comic book by Fr. Pat Seaver & Hugh McMahon (€5.99 postage included; for copies contact Paul Flynn at Kyle House, Henry St, Limerick, tel: 061-313377) Having to sit on so many Sundays to sit beside families with their small children, even some of communion age, are running around the aisles,…
Edie (12A) “Too late for chips?” the 83-year-old Edie (Sheila Hancock) asks her cook in a fast food restaurant. “Never too late for you, Edie,” he replies in what becomes a lightbulb moment for her. This is a sweet little film about a self-professed ‘geriatric’ trying to roll back the years. It’s “never too late”…
Ireland’s Green Larder by Margaret Hickey (Unbound Publishing, £20 / €22; for copies contact support@unbound.com) Peter Hegarty Historically we haven’t been particular about our food in this country. Food writer Margaret Hickey tells us that our forebears feasted on squirrels, foxes, pigeons, and swans. We were once even partial to porpoise. Her engrossing book leaves the…
This Family of Things by Alison Jameson (Black Swan Ireland, €12.60) The father of political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, wrote in Leviathan that the lives of men and women were “solitary, nasty, brutish and short”. There are elements of these qualities in the characters of this very readable novel. At the outset the reader is introduced to William…
World of Books by the Books Editor The other day emerging from my oculists in Grafton Street, I was trying out my new distance glasses. Coming towards me down Nassau Street was a No. 11 bus, bound for ‘Wadelai Park’. Thankfully I could see this quite clearly, but it set my memory going, for…
Sometimes it seems to me that the referendum on the Eighth Amendment is about more than just abortion. Of course, primarily it is, but there are other significant strands. This struck me particularly listening to the interview with An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar on Today With Seán O’Rourke last Friday. When ‘yes’ campaigners are asked some…
Pat O’Kelly The NCH’s 2017/18 International Concert Series is coming to a close. One programme remains on June 12 – the first visit here of the Würth Philharmonic with Russian-born violinist Maxim Vengerov as both soloist and conductor. The principal works are Max Bruch’s evergreen 1st Concerto and Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, which almost tops…
Peter Costello
Greg Daly
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone