In the early 1960s I began to attend Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church, which seemed obsessed with ‘Romanism’ and Romish conspiracies. It was claimed that the Catholic Church wanted an Ireland Romanised from end to end as a springboard from which to take possession of England. The Irish state elevated the Catholic Church to a … Read more
Is not the pastness of the past,’ asks Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, ‘that much more profound, more complete, more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?’ The stories told about the civil rights era invite a positive response to this question. Indeed, the mythologising of the movement began as the events … Read more
Tuned out: traditional music and identity in Northern Ireland Fintan Vallely (Cork University Press €39) ISBN 9781859184431 This book considers the attitudes of Protestant performers and of the broad Protestant community towards Irish traditional music in Northern Ireland. It also discusses how political attitudes have affected traditional music throughout Ireland and how they continue to … Read more
The Northern Ireland Question. The peace process and the Belfast Agreement Brian Barton and Patrick J. Roche (eds) (Palgrave MacMillan, £55) ISBN 9780230203808 On 23 May 1998 at the King’s Hall, Belfast, as the counting of votes in the referendum on the Belfast Agreement was coming to a conclusion, a small group of campaign workers … Read more
Five minutes of heaven 5 April 2009, BBC2 Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel by John Gibney On 29 October 1975 James Griffin, a twenty-year-old Catholic stonecutter from Lurgan, was shot dead by the UVF. The Griffin family home was on the edge of a loyalist area, and at approximately 7.30pm a car containing four masked men … Read more