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Perhaps Edna O’Brien is the greatest Irish author alive. ‘‘Country Girls’, Ireland’s ‘Bell Jar’, remains as gripping and elusive now as it must have been when it was first published. Bookshelves all over the country are crammed with inferior imitations by younger authors. O’Brien always exercises tyrannical verbal control of her writing. In […]
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Rory O’Sullivan reviews The Birdwatcher’s Trip to Alpha Centauri This show is highly ambitious and, in many ways, daft: it takes a lot of risks, most of which pay off. Sometimes it is so absorbing it could make you forget to breathe; sometimes it is warm and relaxed, sometimes bizarre. Its biggest problem is […]
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The recent Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman Report on Kincora has the appearance of good news for Richard Kerr and the other victims of sexual abuse who survived their ordeal at Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast. The report deals with a series of complaints that the RUC received about the abuse of residents at Kincora Boys’ […]
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The writer, David Toms (from Waterford, living in Norway), has a rare congenital heart defect called transposition of the great arteries. For people with transposition the aorta and pulmonary artery are inverted, so that much of the blood running through their bodies is deoxygenated. As children this turns their skin blue at the […]
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1. An amazing coincidence. The latest report into the squalid MI5/6-Kincora Boys’ Home child sex abuse scandal was released on 19 September 2022- the same day as the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. The error strewn Hart Report was released during Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. The Hart report received little or no real […]