When the decade of centenary celebrations began in 2012 (covering events such as World War One, the Easter Rising, emancipation for women, the War of Independence, and so on) the Irish Civil War years were always going to be seen as the most contentious to commemorate. While there are many […]

In May this year history was made in Northern Ireland. For the first time since the 1920 ‘Government of Ireland Act’ that officially created the state of Northern Ireland, a nationalist party has been elected as the largest political grouping. Sinn Fein topped the polls with twenty-seven seats, two more […]

I had the good fortune to be invited by friends to spend time together in New York over Easter. Over a meal one evening, our lovely host Sile, an Irish immigrant of forty years, asked me what I knew about Thomas Meagher. Apart the fact that he was the man who […]

Mariupol, Kherson, Kharkiv. The names of those cities roll off our tongue. A month ago, we had never heard of them. Now they are being spoken of in the same breath as other civilian cities that were destroyed indiscriminately by bombardment; London in the Blitz, Guernica in the Spanish Civil […]

Winston Churchill said famously when speaking of Russia, it is ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’. The same can be said about James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ that was published 100 years ago this year. The novel, which took seven years to write, did not garner much interest in […]

Have you ever pondered, whether there is a point on the human evolutionary ladder, that will be our absolute zenith? If there is a peak in our evolution, then what follows must be a crash. For 2.5 million years, our ancestor’s progression had been miniscule. Yet in the last 500 […]