By Donal Fallon This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the unveiling of Ian Ritchie’s Spire in O’Connell Street, a modern addition to the main thoroughfare which Ritchie said was ‘inspired by the ever-changing light and composition of the Irish skies’. Just over a thousand curious Dubliners gathered in the street below to watch the … Read more
TG4, 14 December 2022 By Sylvie Kleinman ‘Even before we buried our loved ones, the [British] State had buried the truth.’ For families of victims of bombings and murders during the Troubles, getting clarity about the circumstances behind the deaths of their relatives is not the same as finding peace. The NI Police Ombudsman cannot … Read more
Directed by Sebastián Lelio By Maud Ellmann Sebastián Lelio’s movie The Wonder (2022), based on Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel of that name, stars Florence Pugh as English nurse Lib Wright, who is summoned to the Irish midlands in 1862 to stand watch over Anna O’Donnell, a pious eleven-year-old girl who claims to have lived for … Read more
By Joanne Rothwell Sanitary officers were among the frontline workers of the nineteenth century and were key in preventing the spread of infectious diseases and improving the health and welfare of the population of Ireland. The Public Health (Ireland) Act, 1878, consolidated earlier legislation. According to Desmond Roche in Local government in Ireland (1982): ‘This … Read more
By Ian S. Wood On 5 February 1992 five Catholics, one of them a boy aged fifteen, were murdered in Sean Graham’s betting shop on Belfast’s Lower Ormeau Road. The killers were gunmen from the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). Twenty years on from its formation it was still legal, though not for much longer, and … Read more