Ben Keatinge writes: The Amergin Step is a book with many tributaries from the fields of archaeology, myth, folklore, history and literature, but perhaps its unifying principle is that of vision, its way of seeing and interpreting landscape, specifically the Iveragh peninsula in south Kerry. Paddy Bushe has been exploring Iveragh through the eyes and…
Rosemary Jenkinson writes: April 23rd, 2025: This is my sixth trip to Ukraine and I’ve come to gauge the mood of the people during the US-led peace negotiations. All through the night the bus passes town squares with displays of dead soldiers in darkness. Historical buildings are barely lit, trying not to draw attention to …
Neasa MacErlean writes: It is only a hundred years since most leading British historians regarded Ireland as a country with no history. That was to change within a couple of decades, but those years in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s were unstable ones, and the struggle to demonstrate Ireland’s historical character took place against a…
This blog was written before the death of Pope Francis. Michael J Farrell writes: I often wish people would ask me what’s on my mind. What I would then tell them is anyone’s guess. But if the pope were in the news, I might tell the inquiring entity about my novel, Papabile, written forty-odd years…
Lia Mills writes: Kyiv is so beautiful, Victoria Amelina reflects in her posthumously published Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary, it’s no wonder Putin wants it. She also said, in a Dublin café in April 2022, that if Putin were to get what he wants and Russia steals Ukraine, she…
David Blake Knox writes: The four-part Netflix series Adolescence has generated a public response that has not been seen in the UK since the 1960s broadcast of the gritty BBC drama Cathy Come Home. That TV production portrayed the corrosive effects of homelessness on one family. The current series revolves around a young boy of…
Sean Sheehan writes: Traumas cause deep wounds and leave scars, so it is understandable that some veterans of Ireland’s civil war might want it best forgotten. I recall being advised, on the eve of a family occasion to which a survivor from the building of the Thai-Burma railway in Thailand was coming, that it would…
David Blake Knox writes: Thirty-five years have now passed since civil war erupted in the Balkans. In 1990, the Yugoslav federation began to tear itself apart, with insurrections breaking out in most of its six constituent republics. Wars in the Balkans have book-ended and characterised much of the twentieth century in Europe. This one proved…
Maurice Earls writes: The Trump presidency is in the process of taking full political control in the United States. This is something which the framers of the American constitution very much wished to avoid. Institutional checks were written in. The houses of congress and the laws of the Republic have long operated as formidable constitutional…
Gerard Smyth writes: War poet. Love poet. Nature poet. Elegist. Witness to the ‘Troubles’ and what in one poem he calls ‘the stereophonic nightmare / Of the Shankill and the Falls’. Michael Longley had a superb capacity to invent variations on his themes, and each became intrinsic to his art. The sustaining element across his…