Ever since Nicéphore Niépce took a snapshot from a window, overlooking the rooftops of Saône-et-Loire, in the 1820s, we’ve been living, and lost, in the kingdom of the image. With the development of photography, cinema, television, and the internet, the …
The war for the Irish language
Last Thursday, a clutch of Irish-language (Gaeilge) activists burst into Belfast’s gleaming new station shouting “Tír gan Teanga, Tír gan Anam (A country without a language is a country without a soul)”. “What’s this all about?” a woman asked a …
Will there be another Stakeknife?
For a spy, a job requiring furtive anonymity, James Bond always did have an unusual side-line in mass homicide. Apart from The Man with the Golden Gun, where Bond dispatches only the eponymous Scaramanga, his body count almost always hits …
Why the Irish side with Palestine
When Micheál Martin visited Mount Scopus on the outskirts of Jerusalem two months ago, he struck a pessimistic tone. The Irish government’s deputy head had been taken there for a briefing by UN officials, who told him the number of …
Stakeknife’s final escape
Freddie Scappaticci died sometime last week, somewhere in his late 70s, somewhere in England. It is a death that defies obituary.
Obituaries give shape to a death and hold it in context, allowing us to extract explanations and lessons. But …
Ireland will always be divided
Sitting together in the small hours of Good Friday, David Trimble and John Hume slipped into sentimentalism, harking back to holidays spent in Donegal and, in particular, the rugged, rocky peninsular of Inishowen. Inishowen is in the Republic, but is …
What we forget about Northern Ireland
Outside of a handful of busy seaports, the population of Britain between the Norman Conquest and the Fifties was extraordinarily stable. But Irish migration to Britain was huge, even if it is usually left out of the noble lie we …
Ireland’s elites are rewriting the past
When the Irish government published a video to commemorate the centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016, there were a number of glaring absences. The 90-second clip made no mention of its combatants or the bloody crushing of the rebellion …