Léargas

  Micheál Martin has it badly wrong on Irish Unity For almost a quarter of a century I used to spend my St. Patrick’s Day in the United States talking to Irish America and political leaders in Washington. It’s important to understand that the St. Patrick’s celebrations in the USA usually last a week – not a day. Consequently I could be in New York to take part in the celebratory St. Patrick’s Day breakfast with hundreds of others before heading off to Philadelphia, followed by a couple of days of meetings in DC. I have some very fond memories of meeting Irish Americans at these events where they joyfully celebrated their Irishness through music and dance, poetry and craic. On one memorable occasion we arrived in Syracuse in upper New York State for a St. Patrick’s Day parade in the midst of a blizzard. We were not dressed for a blizzard. I walked shaking with the cold beside Pat Aherne the Grand Marshall who was thoroughly enjoying himself. He was wearing a top hat as he waved ...

  6000 DAYS. Jaz McCann writes very well. The reader is quickly drawn into his world. From the opening sentences of his Prologue Jaz paints the sights and sounds, the emotions, shocks, excitement, sadness, smells and the savage brutality and amazing horrors of his 6000 Days of incarceration, mostly in the H Blocks of Long Kesh. He also makes us witness to the incredible courage, vision, commitment, solidarity, idealism, generosity, quirkiness, anger, native contrariness, humour, comradeship and stubbornness of the political prisoners. 6000 Days is an important and significant contribution to the history of the Irish penal experience, in line with Jeremiah O Donovan Rossa’s classic Prison Life or Irish Rebels in English Prisons and other historical penal narratives. I have long had a view that we republicans need to write our own histories. Others should do likewise. Including from a Unionist or even in this case a Prison Officer’s point of view. By setting all these n...