In Trad, a rebellious young fiddle player Shona (Megan Nic Fhionnghaile) leaves her Donegal Gaeltacht home to find herself through her music. She joins a band and lives a hippie lifestyle of hitch-hiking, camping and busking with her sort-of boyfriend Ray (Cathal Coade Palmer) whom she hooks up with on the rebound from the older,…
Mount Jerome: Dublin’s Victorian Cemetery, by Maurice Curtis (The Old Dublin Press, €24.95 / £21.99) Cemeteries have a peculiar fascination for my imagination. But they have their perils. I can still recall the great difficulty of navigating between the plots to reach the grave of the poet and economist George Russell (“AE”), when a…
I held the pen and God did the Writing, by John Tado (Cocoon Press, €10.00 / £ 8.99) The author of this little volume of poems, his second, is a Cork man who began late in life writing what he sees as the poems of a “Catholic poet”. Very much a local man, the…
Slavery: America’s long reckoning from the Founding Era to Today, by Scott Spillman (Basic Books / Little Brown, €35.00 /£30.00) This is not a book about slavery. It is, instead, about how Americans have made sense of slavery: how they have researched and written about it; how they have justified and criticised it.” Such is…
Our gender defines us. Men fight in trenches while women engage in different types of struggles in civilian life. Which is the stronger sex? Is it the military person or the homemaker? Brain or brawn? Adolf Hitler or Eva Braun? We often hear taunts about the British being “the old enemy” but Ireland never had…
No Church is an Island: 175 Years of St John the Evangelist, Sandymount, Dublin, by Alyson Gavin Lysaght & Shabnam Vasisht (€20.00; to purchase contact the church office at sandynount@dublin.anglican.org) This is a book which those who already have Dr Ian Milne’s history of St Bartholomew’s, Clyde Road, will like to have, as it fills out more…
TVRADIO Brendan O’Regan In Ireland we do so much good stuff, and so much bad stuff. It’s not just a case of goodies and baddies, but good and bad struggling in all of us. Some of us are caring, some malicious, some just hapless. Sometimes it’s the dysfunctional systems we create. Over the years we…
From the Earth to the Moons and Around It, by Jules Verne (Aladdin Books / Simon & Schuster, €16.50 / £14.50; many other editions also available) The successful voyage around the moon by the crew of Artemis II brought to my mind this pioneering novel by Jules Verne, who is rightly described as the “inventor of…
The big event in Ireland in recent days has been the release by the National Archives of the online version of the digitalised forms filled in by every household in the country on April 18, 1926 forming the first census since 1911, a census which now presents us with a picture of the then Irish…
I’m uneasy when politics, especially party politics, gets mixed up with religion. Commonly it is religion that suffers. Yet the Church has an imperative to speak out on social justice and moral issues. These thoughts were on my mind as I observed the rather bizarre goings on last week, widely covered in the media –…
Aubrey Malone
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan