Ireland

Thursday

The Spectator

Churchill’s return

From ‘Colonel Winston Churchill’, The Spectator, 13 May 1916: The return of Colonel Churchill to the House of Commons, which we are told is to be permanent, has set going a number of rumours as to the future of the most audacious and brilliant figure in our public life. Colonel Churchill, it is alleged, is to come back into the Cabinet, and to come back as Irish Secretary… What is wanted in the Ministry just now is a man who can he trusted. But who dare say that Colonel Churchill has the quality of political trustworthiness? Be his political genius what it may, he is above all things a mauvais coucheur.

Kate Chisholm

The power of song

You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how we might choose to vote in the coming referendum. Surely it’s just a string of naff pop songs stuck together with fake glitter and a lot of false jollity? The songs are uniformly terrible, the show so overproduced it’s impossible not to mock its grandiosity, the idea that it conjures up the meaning of Europe laughably misplaced. But in a programme for the World Service that caught my attention because it sounded so counterintuitive, Nicola Clase, head of mission at the Swedish embassy in London, tried to persuade us otherwise.

Thursday

The Spectator

What to do in Ireland

From ‘Reconstruction’, The Spectator, 5 May 1916: What Ireland wants just now is firm and judicious military government. The rebellion of last week has been put down, but undoubtedly the embers of the fire are still red-hot, and a very little might fan them into flame again. All students of Irish history know that rebellions in Ireland do not run the course that they run in other countries. The fact that they have become hopeless seems, indeed, sometimes to act as a stimulus to the race which specialises in lost cases. Unless, therefore, a very firm hand is kept in Ireland, and kept till the end of the war, there is a

Saturday

Pádraig Belton

The Easter Rising centenary shows Ireland more at peace with its past

Here in Dublin, Ireland is busy marking 100 years since the Easter Rising of 1916. It is being celebrated, but with far less chest-beating and bombast than met the 50th anniversary in 1966.  And this is a good thing entirely. The Rising lasted for six days.  Its leaders seized key buildings around Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic.  It started a series of events that led to an independent Irish state in the south, but also to the partition of Ireland and a bloody civil war which claimed between two and three thousand lives. Emblematic of this year’s commemoration was an event on Good Friday, at a Unitarian church on St

Thursday

Harry Mount

Rebel angels

This is the first exhibition I’ve been to where the Prime Minister joined the hacks at the press view. A week after the Irish general election, the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, came to the biggest show in Ireland devoted to the centenary of the Easter Rising. Kenny’s presence at the press launch just goes to show how the Irish rebellion against British rule at Easter 1916 is still the defining story of modern Ireland. In fact, the Easter Rising was a pretty good failure, although I didn’t suggest that to the Prime Minister at the press view. The rebellion lasted only six days before it was put down by the British

Pádraig Belton

Shamrocks, green beer and leprechauns – the sheer un-Irishness of St Patrick’s Day

March is the cruellest month if you’re Irish and venture out of Ireland, breeding plastic leprechauns from dead Tesco aisles, mixing green food colouring with American beer, and stirring dull copy from hacks. Come the third week of March, the Huffington Post is telling us how to make green beer – handy for me as I live in Ireland and have never seen it. The Guardian tells us New York’s police eased public drinking and urination laws before St Patrick’s Day. The Wall Street Journal notes the current American craze for leprechaun traps, ‘a tradition that is unknown to many in Ireland.’ Now we have the seeds of #Shamrockgate. From

Friday

Pádraig Belton

Today’s elections show the way towards Ireland’s new politics. But we aren’t there yet

Dublin Ireland goes to the polls today.   The Google Doodle is up, the shadow of history hovers with the 1916 centenary—and Ireland, caught between the two, stalls halfway through a political software update to becoming ‘Ireland Centenary Edition’. Elections are heady things in Ireland these days, on the heels of last year’s Marriage Referendum which saw millennials and returning emigrants registering to vote in droves. Turnout reached 61 per cent last May. In the 2012 and 2013 referenda, it had been 33 and 39 respectively. Ireland, the headquarters of Google and Facebook, has started to morph from the Charles Haughey-era politics of ‘Down with this Kind of Thing’ to a Hashtag Ireland,

Thursday

Jan Morris

From Celtic tiger to pussycat

After a healthy Irish lunch I drove blithely off through the streets of Roscrea, I think it was, to find that everywhere I went the populace was cheerfully waving at me, smiling, gesticulating or blowing horns. When I stopped to ask them why, I found that I had left on the roof of my car a wallet containing my entire worldly wealth, cash, credit cards and all. So paradoxically enjoyable was all this, so irresistibly amused and sympathetic were the bystanders, that I came to think of the event as a sort of leitmotif of my visit to Ireland. For whatever else has happened to the Republic, through it all

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Why I’m in love with Róisín Murphy

Róisín Murphy, the Irish singer-songwriter, is currently touring Europe with her Mercury Prize-shortlisted new album, Hairless Toys. The album, with its odd disco-grooves, dub rhythms and dark, loopy synth sounds, combines pop futurism with a retrospective 1970s edge. The album is tinged with an autumnal sense of loss and the self-examination of an older woman looking back on her life. ‘The things I’ve seen’, the 42-year-old Murphy sings, in a mournful whisper. Why ‘the Irish Grace Jones’ (as Vanity Fair called Murphy) is not better known outside her native Ireland is a mystery. On stage Murphy is supremely powerful because she knows how to keep still. She thinks about the slightest raising

Bruce Anderson

Guinness and oysters — or beef and Haut-Brion — in deepest Ireland

We were talking about the West of Ireland and agreed that there were few greater gastronomic pleasures than a slowly and lovingly poured pint of Guinness accompanied by a generous helping of oysters, in a village restaurant overlooking the sea where peace comes dropping slow: where exertion is left to the bee-loud glade and anyone with any get up and go, got up and went several decades ago. ‘Beware too much glib romanticism,’ said one of our number. ‘You might be talking about some charming little place in Kerry, which could turn out to be a significant recruiting station for the IRA, sending plenty of young men with get up

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The view from my Belfast bus: tribalism as the enemy of prosperity

At Stormont on Saturday, we observed a minute’s silence for the dead of Paris. Our conference group of Brits and Americans had convened two days earlier to discuss conflict resolution, the idea that nationalism and tribalism are the enemies of peace and prosperity, and how all this might relate to the migration crisis; so the moment could not have been more poignant. We had reached the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly by way of a bus tour that was a potted history of the Troubles: up the Catholic Falls Road, through a gate in the ‘peace wall’, back down the Protestant Shankill Road and across Loyalist East Belfast; onwards

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

I may have to revise my view that crypto-currencies are Satan’s work

I confess to being an out-and-out Luddite when it comes to bitcoin and other so-called crypto-currencies. To the extent that I think about them at all, I think that they are an ephemeral by-product of those creepy ‘virtual worlds’ in which obsessed gamers eventually go mad; that only such lost souls could seriously believe unregulated online money might eventually supplant the state-backed real thing; and that fashionable belief in them can only lead to fraud and loss. In short, I concluded some time ago, they are probably the work of Satan. ‘Every normal person above the age of six and not over-affected by chemical stimulants should [grasp] that societal concepts

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

Colm Tóibín on priests, loss and the half-said thing

‘No matter what I’m writing,’ says Colm Tóibín, ‘someone ends up getting abandoned. Or someone goes. No matter what I’m trying to do it comes in.’ It’s a reflection, he says, of his own consciousness. It makes ‘its way into everything’. If Tóibín is on close terms with the ache of loss, few writers have put it to such elegant use. He is in the midst of a period of roaring success: we are sitting in a hotel in Soho, talking about the new film of his 2009 novel Brooklyn, which has the lure and pain of leaving Ireland and family at its heart. Its heroine is Eilis Lacey, a

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

The ‘Stakeknife’ investigation and the dark reality of double agents

The decision by Barra McGrory, the Director of Public Prosecutions in Northern Ireland, to recommend an official investigation into the activities of Freddie Scappaticci – the alleged IRA enforcer and British agent known as ‘Stakeknife’ – seems likely to unearth some of the most painful, long-buried secrets of the ‘dirty war’ in Northern Ireland. In so doing it will raise difficult questions about the permissible limits of state intelligence-gathering which remain highly relevant today. Scappaticci, who denied being a British agent before departing Northern Ireland in 2003, is nonetheless widely reported to have been a longstanding head of the IRA’s ‘nutting squad’, or internal security unit, which was responsible for

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Here’s what happens when you create a ‘safe space’ at a pro-life event

You know all that stuff about ‘safe spaces’, places on university campuses where you’re not allowed to say or do anything mean or that could possibly be construed as mean about anyone in case it hurts people’s feelings, especially if you’re a minority of some description? Well, I got the chance to try it out myself the other day. I was at a gathering in Dublin of pro-lifers – I’d been asked to be one of the speakers at their annual event – and it was all going well. There had been a nice young woman talking about hostels for single mothers. There was also a professor of law from

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Europe’s ever-looser union

Europhiles have warned us for years of the dangers of Britain leaving the EU. But all the while a different spectre has crept up on their other flank: which is that even if the UK votes to stay in the EU in 2017, we might be one of the only countries left. It’s a radical thought, but if they’d like to consider it, the Europhiles should look at what is happening across the continent. Pro-EU countries are proving harder and harder to find. The eastern European countries may still be financial net receivers, but they are now having to weigh up their honey pot against the demands that come with

Thursday

Claire Lowdon

A karaoke version of Kafka

The Blue Guitar is John Banville’s 16th novel. Our narrator-protagonist is a painter called Oliver Orme. We are in Ireland, but it’s hard to say exactly where, or exactly when. There are telephones and cars, but the dress code is antiquated: hats, canes, pocket watches. This is ‘the new-old world that Godley’s Theorem wrought’: people have ‘learned to harvest energy from the oceans and out of the very air itself’. Godley, presumably, is not the real-life economist Wynne Godley but the fictional mathematician Adam Godley of Banville’s The Infinities (2009), whose discoveries supplant relativity and quantum physics. So, the world of The Blue Guitar is a version of steampunk, straight

Thursday

Ross Carey

Dublin

What a delight it is to toy with a wooden newspaper-holder rather than a smartphone, tucked away in the cosy corner by the tall sunlit windows of a Victorian hotel. My companion sips her Baileys coffee, while I hide behind my broadsheet earwigging as a novelist is interviewed — possibly for the newspaper I’m reading. Dublin is still sponsored by Guinness and after I’ve drunk a second pint in the charming Library Bar of the Central Hotel, we head across to the great bookshop Hodges Figgis. En route, we pass Davy Byrnes, where you can still get a gorgonzola sandwich and glass of wine as Leopold Bloom did in 1904.

Thursday

Prue Leith

Diary – 6 August 2015

My Cambodian daughter and her husband have just got married again. Wedding One was a Buddhist affair in our drawing room, complete with monks, temple dancer, gold umbrellas, brass gongs, three changes of costume and a lot of delicious Cambodian food. That was family only, so this time she had the works: the full meringue, 200 guests, village church (she sees no conflict between Buddhism and Christianity), marquee, fireworks. Time was when wedding guests were the parents’ chums and the bride and groom went off as soon as the cake was cut and the bouquet thrown. Now the parents’ friends don’t get a look in. Not on day two either,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How Jeremy Corbyn could boost David Cameron’s majority

Tories tend to think that Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader will be fabulously useful for their party, returning them an even bigger majority in 2020 and pitching his own party into such turmoil that it struggles to work as an effective Opposition. But one benefit of his leadership to the existing Tory majority has been overlooked, which is the effect it would have on the Democratic Unionist Party. Sources in the DUP point out to me that given Corbyn’s friendship with Sinn Fein, they would be unable to work with Labour to exert pressure on the Conservatives in key votes. This may mean that the eight DUP MPs are more likely