TMO favourites The Futureheads have been working on an accapella album, Rant, which will be released on April 2nd 2012. The band from Sutherland, already well known for their adventurous song structures and harmonies (for example their electrifying version of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love – released as a single in 2004, and now some […]
International Women’s Day is at once a problematic and worthy idea; Shoe-horning half the world’s population into a day on the UN’s calendar, along with other hard-pressed categories like migratory birds (14-15 May) and world intellectual property (26th of April) should make you more than a little uneasy, as should the fact that more than […]
Sad news today as word came through from Montreux, Switzerland that one of the giants of Italian music, Lucio Dalla, had died of a heart attack just days before his 69th birthday. The news all the more shocking for most Italians as he had been seen performing at the annual San Remo music festival just […]
Yesterday, despite a popular outcry and serious objections raised, Ireland’s Minister of State for Research and Innovation Seán Sherlock signed into law the European Union (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2012, a statutory instrument which has been described as Ireland’s version of SOPA. The background to the statute is outlined here and here. When news […]
There’s a quote, from an article that Germaine Greer wrote back in the 70s,which springs back in to my mind continuously when listening to certain albums: “When Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho the walls came tumbling down. That’s revelation. The holy Ghost talking. So it can be done. The way to crack a mirror or shiver […]
Imagine the closing of an entire newspaper/magazine/portal online because judges deem one simple phrase published, on one of its pages, to be defamatory. No need to imagine it, as it’s already happened this month – not in China, as one might think, but in the heart of the EU; Italian judges, deeming one phrase published […]
While everyone’s getting caught up in the buzz about The Artist, I have a shameful confession to make: silent movies have always bored the bunions off of me – as a child I gnashed my teeth in despair when Charlie Chaplin or, god forbid, Harold Lloyd came on the television. That’s not to write off […]
The International Criminal Court made legal history in February 2002, when it ruled in what has become known as the’rape camp‘ case that the systematic rape of women in the town of Foca constituted a crime against humanity. In Slavenka Drakulić’s book They Would Never Hurt a Fly – War Criminals on Trial in the […]
First published in the journal of the University of Limerick History Society, History Studies, vol.6 (2005), pp.2-17. The small fourteenth-century Florentine panel in the Hunt Museum, Limerick, shows an image of the Crucifixion. Beside the cross the Virgin falls in a swoon, supported by one of the holy women and St John the Evangelist. At […]