Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Patrick Pearse loved his students not wisely but too well, if you know what I mean – what with writing poems about kissing them on the mouth and relocating his school from the healthy hustle-bustle of Ranelagh to dark woodlands in Rathfarnham. Oh, and his students didn’t necessarily reciprocate the affection: a teenage James Joyce dropped […]
The Irish Times has had a mixed 1916 commemoration. Even its own audiences seem hardwired to expect a certain bias from the newspaper of reference, but one particular decision – or probably a non-decision no one ever thought to check for unfortunate implications – certainly didn’t help. For its 1916 anniversary issue the paper produced a […]
The UN’s Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, has called civil society “the oxygen of democracy” but its space is shrinking. This may be jargon, but it is inspired by a serious threat to democracy – the undermining of basic rights: freedom of expression, freedom of association, and the right to peaceful assembly. Civicus grandly describes itself […]
In his 1976 poem, ‘A Part of Speech’, Joseph Brodsky says Russian narratives of the future and of history are informed by language, not facts. “… and when “the future” is uttered, swarms of mice rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece of ripened memory which is twice as hole-ridden as real […]
Commemorations for the centenary of the 1916 Rising are well underway. This anniversary is being marked in a much less sanitised way than previous significant Easter Week commemorations. This is very welcome. For far too long, ceremonies celebrating the 1916 Rising were based on a highly simplified, monochrome account of history: Rebels good, Brits bad, civilians […]
Michel A aq (1910-1989) was the principal ideologue of the pan-Arabist Ba’ath Socialist party which still rules Syria, as it previously did Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Although born Christian, he believed Islam to be proof of Arab genius and allegedly converted before his death in Baghdad. The Arabs were a motley collection of illiterate warring tribes […]
In 1909 Patrick Pearse wrote a short six-verse Irish-language poem, ‘A Mhic Bhig na gCleas’, translated into English as ‘Little Lad of the Tricks’. A relatively disposable piece, it has since gone on to have an infamous status; proof for many that Pearse had dark sexual proclivities: … Raise your comely head Till I kiss your […]