He attended RBAI – read Law at Queen’s University, turned his back on all of this, took up a paint brush and a pen and…
Browsing: Irish
Easter, 1916 – a terrible beauty was born. It had a dark and little seen twin; a terrible ignorance of the people of the North. South…
A twelve year old Dublin boy has asked Queen Elizabeth to return Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland. This is the kind of blunt thinking,…
Growing up, if I wasn’t in Belfast I was in Bushmills. My father’s hometown where his maternal forbears, the Blairs owned a freehold and farmed livestock.…
There’s a backward Belfast, and there’s a bourgeois Belfast. Two Belfasts. Two Northern Irelands. Rory McIlroy versus Bryson Belfast; unbridled optimism versus plangent wallow, nostomania and…
The Irish government recently published the ‘Global Irish – Ireland’s Diaspora Policy’ . This is an important and innovative document. It poses a question and perplexes.…
Jamie Bryson adores the Union but advocates everything against which the modern Union stands. The man from Donaghadee can call for Union Flags on every lampost,…
We read to know we’re not alone. The moment when words mirror life and lived experience is stirring and emotive, even numinous. Being a middle-class suburban…
“In the beginning was the Irish Rain” wrote Louis MacNeice. Following the historic handshake between the head of the republican movement and the Commander-in-Chief of the…
We have come a long way in the last two decades. And yet, the memory of the horrendous history of the 70s and 80s…
Saint Patrick’s Day is all about celebrating Ireland and celebrating being Irish. Yet in New York, the March 17 parade is “exclusively and explicitly…
A dear colleague recently passed away to liver cancer. He died much too young. On Thursday past I attended his funeral. In our business…
Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate and the world’s celebrated poet passed away August 31 2013. He was Irish to the marrow, his passport avowedly green,…
“Remembering is a noble and necessary act” says Nobel Laureate Elie Weisel: those are words we have taken to heart in this community; words…
Brian John Spencer on multi identities and Irish rugby