He Fell From The Ninth Floor

Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man from Baltimore, Maryland, died from a severe spinal injury he suffered in police custody. Yesterday, after his funeral, serious rioting broke out and Maryland’s governor activated the National Guard and imposed a curfew. Gray’s...

A Story of Revenge

Today, Armenia commemorates the 100th anniversary of what historians have called the first genocide of the 20th century when around 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman forces between 1915 and 1917. In 2001, I wrote a feature about the beginning of the...

Tugs of War and Love

The journalist Brian Rowan has reviewed West Belfast on Eamonn Mallie’s website. Here is the feature in full. The re-written and re-worked novel West Belfast is a story about how the ordinariness, the kindness and the innocence of this place became shattered....

Vergangenheitsbewältigung

“The twentieth century produced the greatest hopes for mankind,” writes Slavko Goldstein, in this informative but depressing memoir, 1941 – The Year That Keeps Returning. “It became the graveyard of great ideals. It taught us that ideals are most often a seductive...

‘A sense of people and place’

The political and cultural commentator Alan Meban has just reviewed my novel West Belfast on the Slugger O’Toole website. Here it is: I grew up hearing Danny Morrison’s name on the radio at breakfast time as Sinn Féin’s Director of Publicity. More recently I’ve known...

Walter Macken

Recently, An Phoblacht published a feature by Robert Allen about the writer Walter Macken who died in 1967 at the age of fifty-one, who has been described by the Connaught Tribune as “Galway’s neglected genius of literature,” and the centenary of whose birth takes...