Search Results for 'House of Lords'

Week VI

The origin of Halloween lies in the Celt's Autumn festival which was held on the first day of the 11th month - the month known as November in English, but as Samhain in Irish.

The Cross of Cong, one of Ireland’s great ecclesiastical treasures, was reputedly made at Cloncraff monastary, Co Roscommon. Its unsurpassed craftsmanship was inspired by its relic, a splinter of the wood of the cross on which Christ was crucified.

On the afternoon of March 18 1912, Violet Martin and her friend Tilly Redington, arrived at the door of Tyrone House, the home of the less than ordinary St George family. The three storey house, in the luxurious Palladian style, and said to be sumptuously decorated inside, is dramatically located by the estuary of the Kilcolgan river, about 2 miles distant from Kilcolgan village.

After World War I the remnants of the Anglo Irish landlord class, found themselves marooned in a new, more democratic social world which some of them resented as plutocratic and vulgar.

I am sure you are all square-eyed, as I am, from looking at TV for the last five or six days. Can you believe it? The American election was last Tuesday, and I am writing this column on the Tuesday of the following week, and still President Trump is shouting that the vote was stolen from him and that he is the true President.

By the 16th century Galway was a compact, well laid out town, with handsome buildings, protected by a strong wall. The wealth of the so called Tribal families, originally Anglo/Normans, built up over decades of canny, and adventurous trade, bought them total control of the municipal authorities. Loyalty to the English crown rubber-stamped their laws to keep the native Irish out of the town. They built large houses in a style that reflected their power, while meeting the aesthetic standards of their European contemporaries. Galway was a place apart from the rest of the island.

The things we want to talk about this week are mostly the same as those of last week, because they keep re-occurring and they keep being interesting and demanding attention and discussion.

Week III

Week III