Ireland's political and cultural magazine
By Rory O’Sullivan It is fitting that after a year mired in controversy, particularly over its relations with Irish actors and directors, the Abbey Theatre should choose ‘Drama at Inish’ for its Christmas show. Plays like this almost invariably swaddle audiences in a cotton wool of nostalgia for the easy days they depict, but which […]
By Rory O’Sullivan EMILY AOIBHEANN’S ‘Mother of Pearl’ is the second in a two-part production and follows ‘Sorry Gold’, which played at this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival. There are three dancers and three musicians in the cast: respectively, two women and a man, and two men and a woman. Aoibheann herself is one of […]
When I was a young man, I managed various used and rare book stores for a company based in Washington DC. As part of this book ‘empire’, we leased a large warehouse across the Potomac River in Arlington, VA. It comprised several cavernous rooms. In one of these rooms stood a veritable Everest of books. Further, the entire […]
2016 was inevitably an outstanding year for the history industry as publishers, writers, and those elements of the intelligentsia that love a good commemoration got to work on the Easter Rebellion’s hundredth anniversary. The Irish people have an interesting relationship with their own history. It is, like their relationship to Catholicism, frequently the subject of […]
Village is loth to get into the salaciousness that drives the professional classes in decadent Dublin. Nevertheless the integrity of the judiciary, and indeed the perception of that integrity, has to be beyond doubt and a story unfortunately came our way which challenged it, anonymously, and was accompanied by affidavits submitted for in camera family proceedings. […]
Gerard Convie is a man who wears sober ties and measures his words. He worked for the County Council in Donegal, once Ireland’s most beautiful and wildest county, as a senior planner for nearly 24 years. He has claimed that during his tenure in the Council planning irregularities were perpetrated by named officials at the highest […]
January The Minister for Health, Leo Varadkar, reveals he is gay to a receptive Miriam O’Callaghan, becoming the first openly-gay government minister in Ireland. The Irish economy is not some kind of exemplar, says President Michael D Higgins, controversially but magnificently. Mahon tribunal reverses its finding of corruption against Ray Burke because the tribunal never […]