Search Results for 'Brendan Behan'

Having just released their new video to accompany the single ‘The Border and the Mistress’ Dundalk-based band Orwells ‘84 are set to make an exciting return to Monroe’s Live on Saturday, August 18 at 8pm.

There is a world of difference between loneliness and solitude, even though they are oft confused. Loneliness often expresses the pain of being alone, while solitude expresses the glory of being alone.

The archive of Conradh na Gaeilge, Ireland’s oldest Irish language organisation, has been launched by NUI Galway. The archive, which extends to 600,000 pages of documents, books, photos, and ephemera collected throughout the organisation’s nearly 130-year history, has been fully catalogued and is now available to researchers.

It seems laughable today but in 1958 Archbishop John Mc Quaid of Dublin, obsessively monitored Irish life to the extent, that he did not have to ban a film, book or play outright, it was sufficient for his secretary to make it known that the archbishop had wondered if that (name of film, book or movie) was the sort of thing a good Catholic should witness.

One of the world’s most iconic designer chairs will form the centrepiece of a unique auction in Ireland later this month.

On a day in October 1936, a young woman, Maureen Canning, from Mohill, County Leitrim, left her digs in Lower Salthill and began to walk, for the first time, to what was then University College Galway.

One recent evening Insider watched the 1967 Jean-Luc Godard film La Chinoise in which a small group of French students sit around their apartment, located in what is described as a “workers’ district”, and engage in theatrical discussions about how they must overthrow the bourgeoise and, in particular, the hierarchal French university system which saw students as passive receivers of knowledge handed down by their god-like professors, rather than participants in a dialectical exchange in which both students and teachers learn from each other and grow as a result. No one, with the exception of chairman Mao, is radical enough for most of these students. The French Communist Party which, to draw an Irish parallel, would have been more or less the political equivalent of present day Sinn Féin, is condemned as hopelessly “revisionist”. The Soviet Union, in particular its then president, the now largely forgotten Mr Kosygin, is convicted by the students at their kitchen table discussions of failing to do enough to support the Vietnamese in their war against Lyndon Johnson. And the French working class, with whom said kitchen table debaters absolutely sympathise, are seen as hopelessly passive. In a mix of desperation, madness, and idealism, the students decide to mount a campaign of terrorism, which will involve them doing something they have singularly failed to do for most of the film; getting up from that kitchen table and going outside. They plan to kill the visiting Soviet minister for culture who has been invited by President de Gaulle’s own culture minister, the novelist and decayed Stalinist intellectual Andre Malraux, to open a new wing of the university. After that, they hope to bomb the Sorbonne in the belief that this will spark a revolution. Insider is against blowing up universities. Partly because he knows such actions more often provoke backlash than revolution. But also because Insider happens to teach at a university and coming out in favour of blowing up universities might lead to an awkward email from one’s department head.

Achill Island, one of the most spectacular and the largest of our islands off the Irish west coast, was the romantic love-nest for a passionate affair between the British novelist Graham Greene and Catherine Walston the vivacious American wife of millionaire British MP Harry (later Lord) Walston in the late 1940s.

In what will be one of the most anticipated gigs in Castlebar this year, up-and-coming singer songwriter David Keenan and his full band will be kicking off their nationwide tour when he comes to the Ruby Room at the Royal Theatre in Castlebar tomorrow night, December 7 - brought to you by Finbar Hoban Presents.

In what will be one of the most anticipated gigs in Castlebar this year, up-and-coming singer/songwriter David Keenan will play at the Ruby Room at the Royal Theatre in Castlebar this December.