‘The Four Masters’—what does that name bring to mind? A GAA club from Donegal, perhaps, but more likely the compilers of the seventeenth-century Gaelic history of Ireland. I’ve often felt that the somewhat eulogistic title of that band of authors in itself ensured for them a place in the canon of Gaelic literature, evoking, as … Read more
Remember the furore a few years back when Minister for Education Mary Hanafin decreed that every school in the state receive, at taxpayers’ expense, a copy of the Royal Irish Academy’s Judging Dev by Diarmaid Ferriter? (God be with the days when such largesse was flung around like snuff at a wake!) Would biographies of … Read more
When I last visited Galway City’s museum it was in an ancient single-storey building beside the Spanish Arch. It was run by an amateur committee and, like most such museums, had a dusty, dark atmosphere with lots of objects out on display, some in cases, many not. The information was typed on slips of cardboard … Read more
Robert Flaherty’s 1934 docu-drama Man of Aran was recently included in IMMA’s remarkable exhibition The Moderns. This decision was unlikely to have been prompted by the subject-matter alone, for the film has a twofold significance. In Irish terms, Man of Aran is indeed a unique visual depiction of life on the Aran Islands in the … Read more
The enduring popularity of the Victorian melodramas of Dion Boucicault, especially his major Irish plays, is a tribute to their ability to survive changing theatrical tastes. The plays lend themselves to high-speed performance and broad characterisations, which are nowadays played for comic effect. An actor-manager-playwright with a talent for riding the wave of popular taste, … Read more