At the end of the nineteenth century most efforts at improving the lot of the Irish were constitutional, led by Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell believed that solving the land question would be the first step on the road to Home Rule. For almost half a century—from the early 1870s to the end of the First … Read more
Nostalgia is a powerful feeling. I was immediately transported back to my teenage years while leafing through Gary O’Neill’s book. Having been part of the early Punk scene in Dublin, memories come flooding back while looking through the section on the 1970s and ’80s. The book itself is a photographic record of those different youth … Read more
Just a little over 50 years ago Telefís Éireann made its debut, helping to erode a sense of isolation that characterised Ireland in the post-war period. John Bowman’s book Window and mirror. RTÉ television: 1961–2011 addresses the personalities, programmes and controversies that helped shape Irish television over the past five decades. As the title suggests, … Read more
‘TITANICa: the Exhibition’ is located in the Transport Museum, and though there are artefacts recovered from the wreck, the focus is more on the small details, the personal objects and the human side of the people behind Titanic and her sister ships Olympic and Britannic, the Atlantic Class vessels that were all built in Belfast’s … Read more
An Conradh/The Treaty was broadcast last December on the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 2011. This prelude to a forthcoming decade of centenaries came just after news that the German Bundestag had received a sneak preview of the current Irish government’s forthcoming austerity budget. The irony of the … Read more