Roy Foster

He knew he was right

A vast number emigrated during de Valera’s rigid theocracy, which lasted over half a century — a fact he barely acknowledged, according to Ronan Flanning’s biography,

issue 14 November 2015

A highlight of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival was the Rough Magic Theatre Company’s production of The Train, a musical by Arthur Riordan and Bill Whelan. Political theatre at its wittiest and craziest, it told the story of the fledgling Irish Women’s Liberation Movement’s publicised trip in 1971 to Belfast to buy contraceptives, ostentatiously importing these banned Satanic devices back into the Republic, where the law obeyed the writ of the Catholic church.

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