Search Results for 'Roman Catholic Church'

Following the extensive publicity and extraordinary use of more than 700 military, police, emergency men and bailiffs, to evict five families from the marquis of Clanricarde’s estate, the people of Woodford and all of east Galway were in a state of shock, anger and fear. It was now clear that Clanricarde would use every method within his considerable powers to evict any of his tenants who refused to pay their rent. Despite pleas for a rent reduction because of successive bad weather, he refused to even consider it. He scoffed at John Dillon’s Plan of Campaign, supported by the Land League, which urged tenants to stick together, and to refuse to pay unreasonable rent.

SCIENCE-FICTION, melodrama, comedy, the road movie; big name directors David Cronenberg and Lars Von Trier; and stars such as Kirsten Dunst, Daniel Auteuil, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen, and Michael Fassbender, will all feature in the Galway Film Society’s winter/spring season.

JIMMY MONAGHAN, the highly talented Irish-American singer-songwriter, will be performing in the Acoustic Room, Áras na Mac Léinn, NUI Galway, today at 1pm.

When I was about midway through my second decade and starting to take an interest in poetry, I was one day leafing through an anthology of English poetry when my eye caught a poem called ‘The Lover Showeth How He is Forsaken of such as He Sometime Enjoyed’.

For nearly a century the Protestant denominations in Ireland set up missions in Connemara. Many were about winning converts, but others sought to help the communities they encountered.

The proposed new bus lane for Bothar Uí hEithir and Forster Street will only be a success if the problem of illegally parked taxis is dealt with first.

Last Easter Sunday, I was privileged to attend a dawn Mass, near Cong, on the Lough Corrib shore. About 300 people stood close to a blazing fire, as daybreak slowly lifted the darkness revealing the wide expanse of water, its wooded islands, and in the distance, the mountains of the Maam valley. It was perfectly silent and peaceful. Fr Ray Flaherty welcomed us with these opening words: ‘It was here many saints like Meldon, Fursey, Brendan and Feichin made their homes of peace and prayer. There are many sanctuaries scattered today in ruins along the shores of this lake, silent ruins where the soft tones of bells and the church’s solemn chant floated over the waves...’

B*SPOKE THEATRE Company come to the Town Hall next week with a production of Tom Murphy’s powerful play, The Sanctuary Lamp, which Murphy himself directs.

Dan Browne’s The Da Vinci Code enraged the Roman Catholic Church with claims that Christ was a married man, while historians warned that the book is not based on factual, reliable evidence.

In a week when The Irish Times reports an unseemly brawl between Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks who physically battled over turf and influence in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, revered as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, I was reminded of the unfortunate battle for the souls of Catholics in the aftermath of the Great Famine. This episode in Connemara’s long history still engenders passionate feelings today. The expression ‘they took the soup’ is still very much alive. At the time the campaign for souls splintered communities, and divided families. In a new book Soupers and Jumpers* Miriam Moffitt reminds us that Catholics and Protestants were convinced that their religion - and only theirs - was the ‘one true faith,’ and that anyone who lived, or more importantly died, outside their particular belief system could not enter heaven. From the middle of the 19th century, the poor of Connemara and the Dublin slums were targeted by the well intentioned Anglican Irish Church Missions.