Two weeks ago, there was a significant celebration in the National Concert Hall as March 30 marked the 100th birthday of the doyenne of our musicians, Sheila Larchet-Cuthbert. Invited guests, including yours truly, gathered in the John Field Room for chat and refreshments before moving into the auditorium where the NSO had just completed its…
‘Blessed are the peacemakers’. This Beatitude seemed to underpin the coverage of the Good Friday Agreement anniversary last week. It hasn’t been 25 years of perfect peace but it has been infinitely better than the Troubles that went before. The event was marked in a prayerful way by the Service for the 25th Anniversary of…
The Death of Jesus: Midrash in the Shadow of the Holocaust by Peter Keenan (Columba Books, €12.99/£10.99) This book is a continuation of the researches that Peter Keenan began to issue through the same publisher in 2021. In a review in these pages back then I felt that despite the deployment of much new information…
Doing Christianity: How religion is about what you do, not what you believe by Paul Higginson (Columba Books, €12.99 / £10.99) As a book for Eastertide, or indeed any time of the year, Paul Higginson’s book is much more interesting. It seems to me to derive more certainly from the precepts and actions of Jesus…
Palm Sunday is a strange kind of day – celebrating the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, but with the cloud of impending events looming over. It’s the emotional rollercoaster of Holy Week, but with the sure knowledge and hope of the Resurrection. On the Mass for Palm Sunday (RTÉ One) I liked the homily of…
When I listened to Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Hallelujah’ on his 1984 album Various Positions I didn’t pay any special attention to it. Interviewing him four years later when he was promoting ‘I’m Your Man’ I didn’t even mention it to him. Bob Dylan played it at a concert later that year. The head of steam…
An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A personal journey into the magic of rewilding, by Eoghan Daltun (Hachette Books, €19.99/£16.99) Christopher Moriarty ainforest is a word all too familiar to conservationists. The context is usually the forlorn one of the replacement of tropical rainforest by intensive cattle grazing for the ultimate production of beefburgers. With this background, the…
The news the other day from the Office of Public Works, that some vandal had scrawled the word ‘fraud’ across the standing stone on the Hill of Tara was dismaying. There is a programme underway to increase the visitor interest in the place, which decades ago lost out in popularity to Newgrange and the other…
Gan Focal/Frugal Speech poems by Gabriel Fitzmaurice, illustrated with paintings by Brenda Fitzmaurice (Arlen House, €15.00/£13.50) Gabriel Fitzmaurice published his first book of poetry back in 1981, and he then combined his own writing with translations of other poets from the Irish. Eventually he was challenged to write himself in Irish. He published a bilingual collection…
RTÉ sure knows how to make excellent one-off documentaries – last week we had a good one! In the Name of the Son (RTÉ One, Thursday) was the aptly-named story of Mags Riordan from Dingle. She had suffered the loss of three of her children – a baby that didn’t survive an accident that saw…
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone