Search Results for 'Saddam Hussein'

IT WOULD be difficult to find three Irish poets more different from each other than Athenry’s Elaine Feeney; Belfast born, Galway resident Fred Johnston; and Dubliner Alan Jude Moore.

THE NEWBIE writers of Galway are an enterprising lot. Not for them the hours we spent gazing into tepid cappuccinos and complaining about what Cúirt or Poetry Ireland were not doing for us.

This week you could not avoid the extensive television coverage that has been given to the weekend’s anniversary of the devastating September 11 2001 attack on New York’s Twin Towers.

It’s hard to imagine that people had the courage, or foolishness, to start up a business without a phone. For most of the 1970s, if you hadn’t an old fashioned phone already, you were out in the cold for a period of at least nine months to two years. The Industrial Development Authority was howling with rage saying that new industries were interested in coming to Ireland, but laughed when they were told “ That’s grand. But, we’re sorry. At the moment there are no phones...”

Pádraig Conneely was in no mood to hear City Hall officials claim they did a good job in responding to the water shortages experienced over Christmas, saying their explanations “would do Comical Ali proud”.

MARCH 20, 2003, the day on which the United States launched its fateful invasion of Iraq, an invasion which toppled Saddam Hussein but convulsed the country in violence and political instability.

TWO OF the three characters whose stories are told in Judith Thompson’s powerful Iraq War drama Palace Of The End will already be familiar to Western audiences.