Ireland's political and cultural magazine
BORD PLEANÁLA: O’BRIEN REVERTS TO RAY BURKE ERA LEGISLATIVE ETHOS Media ignore Department of Housing’s disarray over how to appoint a new Chairperson to guide discredited planning appeals body By J Vivian Cooke and Michael Smith Ireland’s crisis-raddled planning appeals board, An Bord Pleanála (ABP), is an independent, statutory, quasi-judicial body that deals with appeals […]
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There was that nervous anticipation as we sat down in the Point. It’s Bob Dylan after all. And at 81 he is still challenging. There’s none of that reverence that bordered on the mawkish that greeted Leonard Cohen. But Leonard had almost become a legacy act. While Bob was still pushing boundaries leaving an audience […]
The Man in Room Fourteen In one crucial respect, is like everyone else. He’s a working diagnosis about whom we know both far too much and nothing like enough The man in room fourteen spends twenty four hours either going to the toilet or not going at all; is never a happy medium for happy […]
Mr Cogito Considers The Side Effects after Dr. Janusz Crawczyk Baldness and shortness of breath a sudden urge to vomit on coats your own and other people’s. Drymouth, brittle nails, a tendency to be not very good at driving fork-lift trucks and to become even worse at pole vaulting than you already were. Explosive […]
Construction educators ‘Common Knowledge’ promote empowerment to improve the environment, quality of life and the community. Their Co-Founder and lead instructor is on the television every Wednesday If inadequate housing remains Ireland’s biggest problem, new policy needs to be developed and implemented without delay. Build School “Within Common Knowledge, lies the potential to empower […]
Sky News says that the resignation speech of Ms Truss lasted ninety seconds. For some it must have seemed like a lifetime, for others it just flew by. By any standard, it was grim. None of her colleagues appeared with her, not even Larry the No 10 mouser showed up. Her attempt at an […]
1. Outline allegation made. More detailed account awaited. On 17 October 2022 Sharon O’Neill of Sunday Life newspaper in Belfast reported that an alleged victim of child sex abuse had named Lord Louis Mountbatten as one of his tormentors. His name is Arthur Smyth and he was a temporary resident of Kincora in the 1970s. Kincora […]
This play is brilliantly produced and performed. It is hardly uncommon these days to have a work of art whose central theme is dementia, but it is rare to see one this good. What distinguishes Lost Lear is the quality of its writing and production: the play is a carefully constructed piece of theatre with […]
New evidence has emerged about the UVF’s bombing of McGurk’s Bar in Belfast in December 1971. The explosion caused the entire structure of the premises to collapse, killing fifteen Catholic civilians – including two children – and wounding seventeen more. It was the deadliest attack in Belfast during the Troubles. Brigadier (later General Sir) Frank […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
