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Diarmaid FerriterThe Irish Times |
Tá Éire ag Forbairt (Ireland is Building) was the confident title of a gleaming brochure issued by the first coalition government in 1949. It sought...
In dealing with the stubbornness of Northern Ireland prime minister James Craig in November 1921, UK prime minister David Lloyd George sought to...
Did those who have masterminded the Israeli assault on Gaza ever sit down and decide what number of deaths would be acceptable? 10,000? 20,000? 33,000...
In his book Ruling the Void (2013) the late Irish political scientist Peter Mair suggested “the age of party democracy has passed”, with political...
Speaking as taoiseach in June 2018 at the annual commemoration of one his predecessors. John A Costello, Leo Varadkar looked back and forward....
“Sacred heart o’ Jesus take away our hearts o’ stone, and give us hearts o’ flesh.” These were the words uttered by Juno after the death of...
Right from the start, politicians were tetchy about Irish public service broadcasting and uncertain of their role in relation to it. One hundred years...
Speaking in the Dáil in October 1922, Minister for Home Affairs Kevin O’Higgins commented on what was one of the interesting features of the...
In June 1953, over 25,000 people attended the blessing and opening of the new GAA ground in west Belfast, Roger Casement Park. The stadium was...
It is now 35 years since Roger Garland was elected the first Green Party TD. It was the third time Garland had run in the Dublin South constituency...
Sometimes even experienced civil servants can be sloppy in crafting words. In May 1997, John Holmes, private secretary to Tony Blair, less than a week...
Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald made much reference to history this week. In response to the DUP’s decision to resume its place in the...
Perhaps we haven’t moved as far away from 1937 as we might think. The forthcoming referendums on the constitutional articles relating to women and...
––Like many in Cork and well beyond, I would not like to see Páirc Uí Chaoimh rebranded to meet the requirements of funding from SuperValu. But...
In 2020, Dublin poet Rachael Hegarty, like so many sons and daughters of dementia sufferers, fretted as the Covid pandemic restrictions began to bite:...
As prime minister of Northern Ireland a century ago, James Craig faced a 1924 that required a delicate political balancing act. With the first Labour...
The voluminous journals of the playwright, folklorist and patron of the arts, Lady Augusta Gregory, contain a wealth of detail on her relationship...
I had not expected to find myself back in Dublin’s Pro Cathedral. I sang there from 1982-6 with the Palestrina Choir as a far-from-angelic...
In 1939, Trinity College Dublin established a chair of applied economics for Joseph Johnston. A prolific author, one of Johnston’s best known books...
It seems appropriate that Friday’s funeral cortege of Shane MacGowan will pass through some of the streets of a Dublin fraught, raw and struggling...
Much of the political reaction to last week’s Dublin riots smacks of performative outrage. It has been widely asserted that the events have pushed...
One hundred years ago this week, poet WB Yeats was basking in the afterglow of his Nobel Prize win. Head of government at the time WT Cosgrave...
British film director Ridley Scott has been enjoying himself with a good bout of historian bashing as he promotes his new film, Napoleon. Asked by a...
British film director Ridley Scott has been enjoying himself with a good bout of historian bashing as he promotes his new film, Napoleon. Asked by a...
Michael Davitt, the founder of the Irish Land League in 1879, travelled to Kishinev in the Russian empire in 1903 and identified similarities between...
Climate change will ensure the word “unprecedented” wears thin. It was used abundantly this week as the water levels rose to frightening levels in...
When introducing his 1994 book Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm expressed concern that “the...
Writing about RTÉ almost 20 years ago in his book RTÉ and the Globalisation of Irish Television (2004), Farrell Corcoran – who was chairman of the...
Providing historical context for contemporary war is not about justification or side taking. Interpretations of long-standing hatreds do not stay...
One of the more memorable election slogans in Irish political history was used by Fianna Fáil in the summer of 1943, as it issued a warning:...
In July 1966, one of Ireland’s rugby legends, Jack Kyle – who had been the team’s star player when it won the triple crown in 1948 and was...
In 2017, poet and writer Kapka Kassabova published a moving account of the impact of the border zone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece under the...
In July 2010, Dublin was designated a Unesco city of literature. It was a fitting tribute, suggested this newspaper’s literary correspondent at the...
There are many ingredients boiling in the pot of Irish higher education and the broth looks far from satisfying. As students begin or return to...