There were so many instances of classic media bias. It started with The Pat Kenny Tonight Show on TV 3, Wednesday of last week, when the topic was the Eighth Amendment, a debate prompted by last weekend’s meeting of the Citizens’ Assembly. First off there was a soft interview with a pro-choice woman who had…
Logan (15) They say there are really only a half dozen plotlines. Everything else in film (and literature?) is an exemplification of these templates. Old wine, new bottles. And so it is here. For all the blood-spattering, when we get down to it this is really just another tale of crime and punishment, of righting…
World of Books Do Chrstians, and especially Catholic Christians, really understand and appreciate the true nature of Judaism today? I ask this question, which has some importance to the world today, because I have been looking into a book I casually acquired but which has turned out to be quite fascinating. It is called A…
Trespass Against Us (15A) Substitute cars for horses and this is a cowboy movie. There’s the same tribal loyalty, the same love of the outsider, the same revulsion towards authority. The heroes and villains of the wild west become the cops and robbers of regional Britain. We could also see it as the travellers’ answer…
Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? – a documentary with a name to draw in the curious, on Channel 4 last Thursday night. It was billed as an authored programme, an opinion piece, by Trevor Phillips, and despite advance warnings about bad language and racist terms, it was actually a reflective and relatively moderate programme. I…
Felix M. Larkin There are many connections between Ireland and Tasmania, and not only because of the latter’s status as a penal colony in the first half of the 19th Century. These connections are reflected in a beautiful stained glass window in St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral in Hobart. Erected in 1995, the window is dedicated…
Why Not? How to Bring the Liturgy About by Turlough Baxter (Veritas, €8.99) This little book consists of thoughts on the liturgy that originally appeared in Intercom, the pastoral and liturgical resource magazine, over the last dozen years or so. Though aimed by Turlough Baxter at his fellow clergy, it will be read with by many…
Winnie & George: An Unlikely Union by Allison Murphy (Mercier Press, €16.99) This is the story of two almost forgotten figures from the troubled Twenties in Northern Ireland. Winifred (‘Winnie’) Carney was born in Bangor, Co Down, on December 4, 1887. Following her education in a Christian Brothers school in Belfast she graduated from a…
It’s hard to deny that online debate about Amoris Laetitia has been marked far more by heat than light. Indeed, disagreement about the Pope’s exhortation on love and the family has reached such a point that at least one commentator has claimed the Church is now entering a fully-fledged civil war. This is, of course, nonsense: that…
It was a dizzying week, with more drama on Oireachtas TV than on any mainstream channel. It had all the features of fictional drama – moral dilemmas, cliffhanging tension, heroes (short supply), villains (don’t ask), the rise and fall of interlocking story arcs. You didn’t know from breakfast through lunch whether you’d still have a…
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone
Peter Costello
Greg Daly