Since 1858, when the first miracles were recorded, the Church has judged only a very small number of cures as truly miraculous – to date some 69. The Church can be as sceptical at times as any Zola. The most recent recognition was in 2013 of the curing of Mrs Danila Castelli, suffering from a…
Pat O’Kelly Next week the RTÉ NSO celebrates its 70th birthday with its concert at the NCH on Friday, February 16. Directed by former principal conductor Gerhard Markson, music by Wagner, Prokofiev and Deirdre Gribben brings soprano Orla Boylan and pianist Finghin Collins as soloists. But there had been a Radio Éireann Orchestra prior…
It was a mixed week when it comes to issues surrounding the welfare of children. There were so many welcome media debates alerting parents to the dangers of online grooming and abuse of children. I heard calls for the banning of smartphones in primary schools and I heard of the Government rightly supporting initiatives to…
Hopeful Hopkins, essays by Desmond Egan (The Goldsmith Press, €20.00) Noel Barber SJ In these essays, Desmond Egan sets himself a clear goal: to correct the image of Fr Gerard Manley Hopkins as a “sick and self-lacerating person” and to present “the energetic, witty and hope filled” person that existed alongside the “physically frail, hypersensitive, nervous…
The Poet’s Chair: Writings from the Ireland Chair of Poetry (UCD Press, €20.00 each volume) The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust was established in 1998 jointly by Queen’s University Belfast, TCD, UCD, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and An Chomhairle Ealaíon. Every three years a distinguished poet is selected to hold the Chair as…
A Little Book of Ledwidge: A Selection of Poems and Letters of Francis Ledwidge compiled by John Quinn, with an assessment by Seamus Heaney (Veritas, €9.99) India to Ithaca by Paula Lahiff (€10.00; €12.50 including postage, contact paulalahiff@gmail.com) Santiago Sketches by David McLoghlin (Salmon Poetry, €12.00) In Ireland the role of the poet has been respected since prehistoric…
Love’s Doorway to Life: An Alternative Biography of Patrick Kavanagh boxed set of three discs, scripted and narrated by Úna Agnew and Art Agnew (Éist Audio Productions; www.eist.ie, €25.00) These days, with perhaps fewer young people reading books, this three-disc set may well be the ideal modern way of presenting a great poet. The creators are…
Journey’s End (12A) They wait. They joke about soup. They snap off one another. Days pass. The spring offensive looms… We’re in France in March 1918, the last year of World War I. The ‘Boche’ still has some fight left in him and is about to descend on a group of British soldiers in a trench…
The World of Books – By the books editor For a man holding what many still see as the most powerful position in the world, President Trump has an uncanny instinct to express in the brutal language of the bar and locker-room the opinions of some of the most uninformed people in the United…
Last Saturday was Holocaust Memorial Day and also the day An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar declared (on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, curiously) that he would campaign to liberalise Ireland’s abortion laws. To mark the former, Nationwide (RTÉ 1) last Friday evening broadcast a moving programme featuring the Island of Ireland Peace Choir on a visit…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone