Anyone who has caught “Reeling in the Years,” RTE’s knock-off of the BBC’s “The Rock’n’Roll Years”, in which contemporary music is spliced in with archive news footage would quickly be reminded that Ireland in the 1980s was a basket case. Moving statues, hunger strikes, mass emigration, and Miami Vice-style jackets all featured prominently in the […]
When planning the Holocaust, Hitler famously referred to the Armenians, as an example of how quickly the world forgets terrible events. The Armenian Genocide however has not been forgotten and eighty-nine years after the event, remains a contentious and controversial topic. Turkey, Israel and the United States are amongst the countries that do not recognise […]
Buddhism is probably the trendiest, most acceptable religion in Western society today. While the three biggies from Jerusalem undergo various public relations disasters, this modest, mystical faith from farther East marches into that space in the public consciousness recently vacated by Christianity. Indeed, the average, baptized Catholic or Protestant is more likely to have a […]
Geoffrey Beattie is a Professor at the Department of Psychology in the University of Manchester. A native of north Belfast, he was later educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He has written a memoir of his life growing up during the Troubles of the 1960s and '70s, called Protestant Boy (Granta). Mark Harkin met Geoffrey during […]
As the world and his wife, in Joycean terms, turn their attention to Dublin, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the fictional event of Bloomsday, it seems almost as if a lone Irish voice is reminding us that Joyce wrote most of his work outside of Ireland, and in particular a large part of it […]
Andrea di Robilant is a soft spoken Italian journalist, with just the slightest hint of an American accent coming through, (he has American family roots on his mother's side, and for a number of years was the La Stampa correspondent in America). He is more likely to be found writing about International Politics than 18th […]
Browsing through a conservative message board on the net, as Three Monkeys is wont to do, we came across a debate about George W.Bush. One poster, an obvious liberal, had complained that Bush can't even put a sentence together. The response was along the lines of 'Who cares about putting a sentence together – he […]
Just as the 60's generation erroneously thought they had discovered sex, the 90's generation could be forgiven for thinking that it discovered globalisation. The media have embraced the word, and it's vaguest of vague concepts, to the point that it's become a shorthand for almost anything and everything to do with international trade. At the […]
The 1916 Proclamation declared that, 'The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, … cherishing all of the children of the nation equally'. This was further upheld in the Constitution, which declared all citizens equal before the law. So who are the citizens of Ireland? According to […]