History & Folklore

Ní hé lá na báistí lá na bpáistí (the day of rain is not the day of children). Anyone who has ever tried to entertain young children when it is too wet to go outside – especially on holidays – will appreciate the accuracy of this proverb. There is hardly […]

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 […]

Ciarán was born in 352 on Cape Clear Island off the coast of West Cork. His mother was Liadhain who was of the Corcalee tribe of West Cork (the main sept being the O’Driscolls), while his father was Lughaidh of  Ossory (Co. Offaly) which was also part of the Corcalee […]

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 […]