The act of picking blackberries is ingrained in the minds of most of us: We all have fond memories of carrying our buckets out into the fields and along the hedgerows to collect the luscious black fruit that hung from the brambles. It was usually sunny when we went on […]
Columnists
Our garden is like a food bank, we are awash with produce. The harvest came early this year and we have been eating a month ahead of time. The heatwave in June encouraged everything along and even though we apparently had the wettest July on record it wasn’t cold and […]
Is there any other feature of the Irish landscape more iconic than a field? From John B Keane’s masterpiece to nostalgic childhood images of running through summer meadows, the field is quintessentially Irish. Sure, there’s cliffs and mountains, lakes and rivers, forests, and the wild Atlantic way; but for me […]
I think it’s fair to say this summer has been a far cry from the sunshine and record commodity prices of summer 2022. Rain has made for an incredibly difficult harvest for tillage farmers. The washout summer, a contraction in milk price in excess of 30 per cent and continuing uncertainty […]
I have a love-hate relationship with historical movies. If you’re into historical material, of course you’ll be enticed to go see one. But so many historical movies have led to misleading facts and wrongful portrayals, like the much-loved Micheal Collins movie; with its 1970s-style IRA car bombs going off in 1920s […]
“The owner of the shadow is my mother.” – Sachiko Ochi The atomic bombs that were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki encapsulate one of the darkest periods in human history. exemplifying humankind’s ability to inflict the most heinous of crimes on one another. The complete capitulation […]