Many readers will hear Handel’s Messiah at the annual performance by Our Lady’s Choral Society on Fishamble Street, which, this April, will be part of Dublin’s first Handel Festival. Few, I suspect, will be familiar with the story of rejection and rehabilitation that lies behind it—in particular, why it was that a German, who had … Read more
Last year I highlighted the case of Newry attempting to reclaim the Carvill Papers from Paterno Library, State College, Pennsylvania. A petition to that effect was ignored by the library but an imaginative ambush has turned things around. Pennsylvania were one of the two American football teams playing in Croke Park on 28 August last … Read more
‘John Ross, a Presbyterian born in Derry in 1853, was a captain of Dublin University Hurley Club in the 1870s, with Edward Carson on his team. His aptitude at “hurley” may have derived from childhood experience of camán, for this short-lived hybrid sport at Trinity College resembled embryonic hockey in ground-play style and rules more … Read more
No doubt we will be hearing a lot of Eric Bogle’s song—perhaps the greatest anti-war song ever written—over the next few weeks and months as we mark the centenary of the Battle of Gallipoli, in which over 130,000 died, including c. 5,000 Irishmen. What seemed like a strategic masterstroke—that would knock out one of the … Read more