The recently completed restoration of Notre Dame in central Paris has absorbed the interest of so many people over the last five years that other such work in other places have been sadly overlooked. Central Paris gets millions of visitors each year; Palermo, the capital of the Island of Sicily, is less popular, for various…
In the new Programme for Government, which Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been labouring over with the rural independents, there is a curious omission. No provision is made for any official arrangements to mark the Bicentenary of the Catholic emancipation which falls in the summer of 2029. Given the huge volume of effort and…
Edinburgh: A New History, by Alistair Moffat (Birlinn, £14.99 / €18.00) Edinburgh: The autobiography, edited by Alan Taylor (Birlinn, £20.00 / €24.00) I am always astonished when Dubliners extol the graces of Georgian Dublin, thinking to myself that they can never have seen Edinburgh to make such a statement. Undoubtedly the New Town of Edinburgh…
Healing Wounds: The 2025 Lenten Book, by Eric Varden (Bloomsbury Continuum, £12.99 / €15.50) Here we are, as I write on the sixth day of a New Year. Christmas is well past; but life and faith go on. This title is the first book addressed to Lent and Easter tide that has come to hand;…
Dreaming a New Dream: Conversations on the future of the Church in Ireland, by Jim Deeds, with a foreword by Julieann Moran (Messenger Publications, €9.95 / £8.95) The pastoral minister Jim Deeds will be familiar to many readers as the co-author with Brendan McManus of Discovering God in the Mess and its two follow-up titles. This is…
These days, due to change in the release of state papers at the British National Archives at Kew outside London and at the Northern Ireland Records Office in Belfast, the former fifty years closure periods for files has been reduced to 30 years, so that the Irish side of the story can be told in…
Since the founding of the state in 1922 the question of a sort of Order of Merit, a Legion d’Honneur, or even a Presidential Medal of Freedom (a successor to the Presidential Medal of Honour) in the USA, has been much debated. The Constitution does not allow the awarding of any title of nobility, and…
The sudden decision of the government of Israel to close its embassy in Ballsbridge because of, so the government in Jerusalem claimed, the outright “anti-Semitism” of the Irish government brings archive files relating to Robert Briscoe (dating from 1944 and 1955) in the latest release into focus, which suggest that the Netanyahu government’s grasp…
The poet and Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats died on 28 January 1939 at Roquebrune-Cap Martin, on the French Riviera. In ill health for some years he had been staying there to enjoy the mild warm winter weather for several years. He had said to his family that if he died he might…
Irish Paris: Stories of famous and infamous Irish people in Paris through the centuries by Isadore Ryan (€19.00; reach irishmeninparis.org for details of purchase) This is an interesting and entertaining book by a Paris based Irish economic journalist with a passion for the past. He is the author of two previous books, No Way…