Comparing Irish nationalism and Zionism. By Aidan Beatty In one of the most memorable scenes of Myles na gCopaleen’s classic 1941 satire An Béal Bocht, the erstwhile narrator, Bónapárt Ó Cúnasa, recounts the arrival of a group of festive Gaelic League day-trippers in his imaginary village of Corca Dorca. Ó Cúnasa describes an odd practice … Read more
ANU Productions Tenement Museum, 14 Henrietta Street, Dublin 1 By John Gibney Hentown is the latest in ANU Productions’ongoing series of location-specific dramas that endeavour to explore murky and uncomfortable aspects of modern Irish history and, more recently, aspects of the ‘Decade of Centenaries’.Hentown moves away from the period 1913–23 but returns ANU to the … Read more
Dr Patrick McCartan’s mission to Moscow, spring 1921. By Michael Quinn When Éamon de Valera, president of the First Dáil Éireann, boarded the SS Celtic bound for New York out of Liverpool in June 1919, his mission to the USA was twofold: to seek recognition for the Irish Republic from the US government and to … Read more
Directed by Christopher Nolan By Lar Joye Christopher Nolan has reimagined the World War II movie for a younger generation and, like Saving Private Ryan twenty years ago, has set a new standard for the war film. If you grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in Dublin, every Sunday there were wall-to-wall British war … Read more
Addressing a historical imbalance in Irish folklore-collecting. By Deirdre Nuttall and Críostóir MacCarthaigh When one thinks of folklore study and folklore-collecting in the area that is now the Republic of Ireland, the Protestant community is not normally the first sector of society to come to mind (using the term here to denote the array of … Read more