There’s a difference between emotion and emotionalism, between sentiment and sentimentality, between pathos and bathos. Unfortunately, Morgan Matthews’ 500 Miles (12A) loses out on all three counts. If Maeve Binchy was still with us, it’s the kind of thing she’d probably be penning, giving us an Ireland that’s not so much the way we see…
The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland, edited by Gladys Daniel and Andrew Holmes (Oxford University Press, £137.50 / €130.00) Readers who are not dismayed by the suggested price of this academic book will find that it provides a wider view of Ireland in contrast to the letter box view provided by the Census of 1926.…
Here we go again – another effort in Leinster House to liberalise our abortion laws, courtesy of the Social Democrats. Is there not enough death? Party leader Holly Cairns TD was interviewed briefly on Today with David McCullagh (RTÉ One, Tuesday). The host challenged her with a relevant point – the people voted to repeal…
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…
Aubrey Malone
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan