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 […]

Welcome to 2022. Perhaps the most significant anniversary in Irish history, this year is the centenary of the Irish Civil War. Let’s look at contemporary events elsewhere to put this war in context. Why did this conflict, that only had a fraction of the 38,000 deaths suffered during the Finnish […]

In 1954, USA, the civil rights movement won a landmark case which ruled that the segregation (the deliberate and legal separation of the white and black races), of schools was unconstitutional. This landmark case, known as ‘Brown v Board’, would mean the dismantling of all segregated institutions from Mississippi to […]