Last Sunday Netflix launched a new documentary, Hostage to the Devil, about the legendary exorcist and former Jesuit Malachi Martin. My appetite had been whetted by an interview with one of the producers, Sharon Lysaght, on The Ryan Tubridy Show, Wednesday morning of last week. As documentaries go it was excellent, a fascinating story well…
I spent way too much time last Saturday glued to my screens watching the proceedings of the Citizens’ Assembly, streaming on the RTÉ News Now channel and online. It was a lot to take in. First off, I found it rather disconcerting to find an unrepresentative bunch of citizens (100 to represent four million?) meeting…
One of the most interesting programmes shown over the Christmas period was the film Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village on RTÉ 1. This documentary told the story of Knock Shrine, mainly through interviews with some of the people involved in that parish. Parish priest Fr Richard Gibbons was a central focus of attention,…
Well, there’s another year down, a year full of significant stories and media developments, with the prospects of a rather uncertain 2017 ahead. It strikes me that social stability and civilisation are fragile enough and that complacency would be a bad mistake. It was a year of high drama on the political front, from Brexit…
Catholic University of America’s Christmas Concert EWTN Christmas Eve 11am and Christmas Day 3.30pm The annual Christmas concert presented by the Catholic University of America, featuring a brilliant blend of angelic voices and the wonderful sounds of the Christmas Season. The Word is Born: Christmas with the Louisville Chorus EWTN Christmas Eve 3.30pm and Christmas…
Stereotyping is normally regarded as a bad thing, and that’s fair enough, but sometimes it seems that it’s acceptable to stereotype certain people, including Catholic priests. These thoughts were prompted by a few episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, currently showing on TV3, Wednesday nights. Last week’s episode wound up a story about…
One thing that makes me proud of Ireland is our largely pro-life culture, but sadly this ethos is under constant threat. Last Friday’s interview with Ann Furedi of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) on Newstalk Drive was disturbing listening. She was particularly frank in seeing abortion as a fall back option when contraception failed.…
It’s all about The Narrative – you know, the version of a story carefully spun to suit somebody’s agenda, gleefully swallowed by the unthinking and enhanced by a trip to Outrage Factory. And so it was with the symphysiotomy controversy. For the last few years this child birth intervention was seen as ‘barbaric’, ‘torture’ and…
After the recent political earthquake and the ongoing aftershocks it’s a relief to get back to some fictional drama. The Missing (BBC One Wednesday nights) is the second season of this mystery series about people going missing in the most criminal of ways. The plot is complex and there’s lots of time shifting between…
On his Today With Seán O’Rourke show (RTÉ Radio 1) Wednesday morning of last week the presenter described it as a ‘political earthquake’, and words like ‘extraordinary’ and ‘revolution’ were scattered about liberally. A restless sleep Tuesday night of last week saw me checking intermittently on developments in the US election so I could gradually…
Brendan O’Regan
Courtney McGrail