Apr 26, 2014 | Features
On 8th March, the weekend section of the Irish Times devoted a full broadsheet page to an astonishing photograph showing a backstreet Belfast scene from the early 1960s of a young, smiling Seamus Heaney, in an Aran sweater, surrounded by about fifteen joyous kids, at...
Feb 17, 2014 | Features
Was on Radio Ulster’s The Nolan Show today about the campaign by some Celtic supporters to put a hunger strike song, Roll of Honour by the Irish Brigade into the BBC charts. I am not a soccer supporter – I prefer Gaelic football and rugby. In 2004 I wrote...
Feb 12, 2014 | Features
The New York Review Books Classics, which started in 1999, is a treasure trove of fiction and non-fiction and includes titles from the traditional canon but also books from across the world that fell into obscurity or that had not been translated into English. I have...
Feb 11, 2014 | Features
Discredited informer Raymond Gilmour, one-time citizen of Derry, has been resurrected in the media and by those opposed to Sinn Féin in order to attack Martin McGuinness. However, few of those journalists – particularly, Tony Allen in the Belfast Telegraph...
Feb 10, 2014 | Features
Last November I was on a book tour of southern Germany and Switzwerland regarding my novel, Rudi – In The Shadow of Knulp. At Staatliche FosBos in Munich Dr Wolfgang Streit of the school’s English Department invited me to do a reading in front of 150...
Feb 7, 2014 | Features
Opera! Sinn Féin is holding this year’s Ard Fheis in Wexford Opera House. I loved ard fheiseanna, from many decades ago when Tom Hartley and I, recently released on bail, came down and made our nervous, first speeches in the mouldy old Dublin Mansion House....
