Jim Fitzpatrick’s motivation for producing a poster of revolutionary Che Guevara was both personal—he met the man himself as a 16-year-old—and political: he was a left-wing activist himself by the time he produced his first Che image five years later. His family background would not have suggested such an outcome. He describes his mother as … Read more
The fear of embarrassment, a comrade from my Workers’ Party days once told me, is stronger than the fear of death. He knew what he was talking about. The INLA had threatened to kill him, and the threat was very acute on a particular Saturday night. It happened to be a night when he and … Read more
Within a year the euphoria both on and off the pitch had long since evaporated. By May 1974 the Ulster Workers’ Council strike had put paid to the Sunningdale power-sharing experiment, and Northern Ireland was to endure another quarter-century of violence. The Republic had already missed out on qualification for the 1974 World Cup before … Read more
In the summer of 1972 the Republic of Ireland soccer team was invited to play in a friendly tournament in Brazil to celebrate the 150th anniversary of that country’s independence. The Republic had been on a terrible run, which had reached its nadir the previous year with a 6–0 thrashing by Austria on Sunday 10 … Read more
There is something hallucinatory about the wealth generated by rubber, comparable in our own time to the empires built on the back of the narcotics trade. One such hallucinatory kingdom was briefly forged by Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo, son of an Irish-American sea captain, whose life has been popularly mythologised by the Werner Herzog film. In … Read more