Search Results for 'Tom Kilroy'

ALMOST SIX months have passed since the death of the much-loved poet Seamus Heaney and Galway will commemorate his life and work in a gala event at NUI Galway’s Bailey Allen Hall on Wednesday February 26.

Culture Night 2012 will take place on Friday, September 21 with cultural institutions from across the country opening their doors to stage a series of special events to mark the occasion. Among those hosting events for this national evening of celebration are the Archives and Special Collections services in NUI Galway’s James Hardiman Library.

Jennifer Johnston, Eugene McCabe, Theo Dorgan, and Dermot Healy, will be among the 70 major Irish writers coming to Kenny’s to help the bookshop celebrate 70 years in business.

As the war progressed, rumours swept the country of foreign incursions and sinister hostile action. Seamus O’Brien was “off-duty” on a warm autumn evening in 1940 when a “Red Alert” invasion scare sent shock waves through Callan.

AS CÚIRT celebrates its 25th birthday, the festival programme is also hosting a 40th birthday celebration for Gallery Press, Ireland’s pre-eminent poetry publishing house.

AS CÚIRT celebrates its 25th birthday, the festival programme is also hosting a 40th birthday celebration for Gallery Press, Ireland’s pre-eminent poetry publishing house.

In Roy Foster’s impressive biography of WB Yeats* he tells an interesting anecdote concerning the sinking of the RMS Lusitania off the Cork coast on May 7 1915. The Galway writer Violet Martin (the second half of the caustic but amusing Sommerville and Ross duo), was walking by the sea near Castletownshend, Co Cork, when she saw the Lusitania pass in ‘beautiful weather’. Half and hour later, as the ship steamed passed the Old Head of Kinsale on her way to Liverpool, it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Nearly 2,000 people perished.

TOMORROW, SATURDAY, and Sunday, the fabled Coole Park plays host to the 14th annual Lady Gregory Autumn Gathering which, as ever, features a top-notch array of speakers and performers coming together to celebrate Lady Gregory and her world.

Ireland has every possibility of getting back the 39 controversial paintings, willed to the Irish people by art collector Sir Hugh Lane at the beginning of the 20th century, but which remain in London because the codicil to his will was not witnessed. “Hugh Lane’s intentions were absolutely clear”, the dynamic director of the Hugh Lane (formerly Dublin City) Gallery, Ms Barbara Dawson said in Coole last weekend, “there is no reason on earth why the paintings are not on Irish soil permanently.”

Every time I see the long angular shape of Ken Bruen loping through the back streets of Galway, I say to myself: ‘Bet he’s on a new case.’ Ken Bruen is acknowledged as one of the world’s best crime writers. He has written an amazing 27 novels, compiled numerous collections, and won heaps of awards and nominations, especially for his first Jack Taylor series beginning with The Guards (published 2001).