Were they from Dax? It didn’t matter.  They had the sound of the bands from countless occasions in that corner of France; a place where rugby and bull fighting compete for popular attention, and where both are followed with a passion that is incomprehensible to outsiders.

The bull ring in Dax is packed for the feria each August; thousands…

Paddy never needed such a sign; he didn’t even need to be at the shop.  Pharmacist in an isolated town on the western seaboard, there would be callers at the house on a Saturday evening.  Frequently the callers would arrive by tractor; the only journey of the week from a remote farm.  The trip would take in shopping, Saturday evening Mass, a couple of pints in a bar, and, when necessary, a call with Paddy.

“I can’t…

It has not been the most auspicious week in Irish history: the Catholic Primate facing calls to resign over his complicity in covering up child abuse; the man who exemplified the worst excesses of the credit bubble being arrested by Gardai; the European Commission saying that public spending cuts, cuts that hurt most the poor and vulnerable, may be need to be much deeper if the Government is to have funds to prop up the financial sector. There have been better…

Until recent years, there would have been ritual clerical condemnation of the excesses, in some quarters there would have been harsh words about such celebration taking place at all.  Times being what they are, young people taking too much to drink is a minor misdemeanour when compared with the institutional crimes of the…

It is good to have an opportunity to remember what today is really about – not parades, not entertainment, not drink, not sporting events, not all the other stuff that goes with St Patrick’s Day. This day is about remembering the arrival of the Christian faith upon these shores.

The vibrancy and the power of that faith comes through in the writings of the time. Being a Christian wasn’t…

A lady in her late-90s defined the feeling succinctly, “The problem”, she said, “is that I don’t feel that I am the age I am”.

When she declared herself to be feeling tired one day, I said to her. “You…

He being far cleverer than I, not a Protestant, and it being one of those arguments that was so subjective that no conclusion was possible, there seemed no value in arguing the point. Do we really not do revisionism?  Do we really not rewrite the past in our own minds so that we appear differently from the way that others might see us?  Is it the case that we don’t sometimes simply misremember things?

Revisionism is a rewriting of history and his point,…

The cashtill beside the Dun Laoghaire Allied Irish Bank has a notice with little pictures to show which cards may be used to withdraw cash; amongst them was a picture of an Ulster Bank servicecard as it appeared sometime in the past.  It followed the example of its parent company, National Westminster Bank in having a card coloured white, caramel and orange.  It was not the most striking piece of design; even in 1979 it looked like something from a decade before, had there…

Looking in the archive, the very last blogspot post was a piece of spiritual reflection.

“Contemplative prayer at church this evening reflected on the words, “I have carved your name on the

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The Wikipedia page on postmodernism quotes the Italian medievalist and semiotician (and excellent novelist!) Umberto Eco who characterised “the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she…