The Ulster Historical Foundation published eight new titles in 2011 on a very wide range of subjects—everything from George Sigerson (George Sigerson: poet, patriot, scientist and scholar by Ken McGilloway, 168pp, €19.99/£16.99 hb, ISBN 9781903688212), the Gaelic scholar, to George Best (George Best will not be playing today, edited by Barbara McNarry, 176pp, €29.99/£24.99 hb, … Read more
Coal has been mined in Ireland for centuries and was extracted from the Arigna mountain from the seventeenth century until recently. This could have been a lost heritage had it not been decided to turn the last remaining mine into a tourist attraction. En route to the Mining Experience you pass a coal plant in … Read more
‘They never drank water but whiskey by pints And the shanty towns rang with their songs and their fights . . .’It is perhaps unsurprising that the opening minutes of The men of Arlington should feature a song from the Pogues, a band who embody the London-Irish spirit and who sang of White City, Kilburn, … Read more
The boundary between serious and popular theatre is sometimes hard to define, especially in the case of a playwright like John B. Keane, whose work straddles the boundaries between the two. Keane’s first play, Sive, was rejected by the Abbey and was first performed in his home town in Kerry by the Listowel Drama Group … Read more
The sandstone peaks of the Skelligs loom out of the Atlantic seven miles off the coast of south-west Kerry, of which they are a geological extension—an almost ironic connection, given how utterly divorced the Skelligs now are from the human life of the mainland. The hardship of life on the neighbouring Blasket Islands was immortalised … Read more