Latest news with #BookofKells
RTÉ News
3 days ago
- General
- RTÉ News
Rare cranes return to Offaly bog for seventh year
A pair of rare common cranes, which have previously nested at a bog in Co Offaly, have returned for a seventh consecutive year. The pair, which have successfully reared five chicks in the last three years, have been seen back at their favoured nesting site by an ecologist working for Bord na Móna (BnM). Following careful monitoring it has now been established that the pair are once again incubating eggs. The location of the nest is confidential in order to protect and conserve the birds. However, it is confirmed that the site is situated on a cutaway bog, formerly used to harvest peat for energy production. "These birds are now benefitting further from habitat improvements associated with BnM's Peatland Climate Action Scheme (PCAS)" said Chris Cullen, Ecologist at BnM, who has been monitoring the Cranes since 2022. "Over the last two breeding periods, the nesting pair and their young have been seen utilising recently rehabilitated cutaway peatlands for feeding and shelter" he said. "In addition, over the last number of years, several summering, but non-breeding individuals, have also been observed on other rehabilitated cutaway bogs in the Midlands" said Mr Cullen. "It appears a nascent breeding population is possibly becoming established, with clear links to rehabilitated peatlands in terms of usage" he added. The Peatland Climate Action Scheme is a large-scale peatlands restoration project administered by the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications and regulated by the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Over 20,000 hectares has been rehabilitated under this Scheme to date. It is hoped that the ongoing development of wetland habitats following rehabilitation under the present scheme will continue to support the expansion of this newly returned species in Ireland. The crane is deeply connected to the culture and history of Ireland. They have been central to folklore tales such as Fionn Mac Cumhaill, the druids, St Colmcille and the Book of Kells.
Irish Independent
29-05-2025
- Irish Independent
Frank Coughlan: Those of us who have to pay crazy Irish prices every day know exactly what's keeping tourists away
It was a showery day on Dublin's Nassau Street and a gaggle of American tourists in windbreakers, fresh from a visit to the Book of Kells, were bunched at the door of their tour bus, eager to hop on board.
The Journal
16-05-2025
- Politics
- The Journal
US students entering fifth day of 'complete fast' in protest over universtity ties to Israel
CALIFORNIA STUDENTS TAKING part in a fast in protest against their universities' ties to Israel say they were partially-inspired by Irish republican hunger strikers. A number of Stanford University students were arrested after they staged a sit-in protest last month. The students taking part in the fast want the charges dropped. Since an encampment last year involving hundreds of students, the university has enacted new rules around when, where and how people can protest, which the protesters want reversed. The university has also rejected calls for divestment from companies contributing to Israel's siege in Gaza. It argued that any changes to investments to 'advance any particular social or political agenda' would conflict with its policy. The 15 students and faculty members at Stanford who are now on their fifth day without food say they won't relent until the university meets their demands. Among the strikers is Owen Martin, a first year physics student who said his ancestors moved from Belfast to America during the famine. 'We came here during one man-made famine, and now we have the worst man-made famine in history spreading across Gaza,' he said. 'There's a very strong personal connection that I feel.' Asked how he's feeling after days without food, Martin said: 'I'm holding up. I think one of the biggest things that keeps me going is that I can break the strike anytime that I want. I can end my hunger, but our brothers and sisters in Gaza cannot.' He hopes that the extreme measure will see the university 'finally start to listen'. In a statement a spokesperson for Stanford said it 'does not intend to negotiate' with the protesters. They said Stanford respects the rights of students to express their views as long as it's within the restrictions introduced last year. Advertisement Dr Rupa Marya, a veteran activist and professor of medicine for 23 years, is supporting the students involved. Her research focuses on the impact of colonialism on health. She said it was incredible that the students' actions were being met with 'deafening silence from the administration of these schools'. The hunger strikes are not only inspired by Irish history, but recent action taken by students in Trinity College Dublin. An encampment on the grounds and a blockade of the Book of Kells tourist experience resulted in the university committing to divestment from Israeli companies. Marya said the protest was 'tactical brilliance'. Stanford students are doing what is known as a 'complete fast', meaning they don't eat any calories, but they do drink water. Marya has been providing information to them about what happens to the body when it fasts, as well as their rights should they become hospitalised. 'If someone's unconscious and they show up to an emergency room, we have to do everything we can to make sure they don't expire and make sure they don't die. Martin said that another group is ready to begin fasting should the university continue to refuse to engage. Yousef Belal Helal, a masters student in electrical engineering, is another striker. He said that his muslim faith inspired him to protest against what he sees as injustice. 'The movement is never going to be just sunshine and rainbows, right? It's not just going to be going to protests with your friends and having a jolly old time. Sometimes we have to make sacrifices to stand up for what's right,' he told The Journal . Helal said the 'authoritarian' rules around protesting on campus infringe on their right to freedom of speech – a claim Stanford denies. The Stanford protests are part of a wider student movement in the US right now, concentrated in the state of California. Other universities involved include San Jose State University and San Francisco State University. There is also a group of 11 protesters staging a fast at Yale, on the east coast. Last year, a former IRA hunger striker and an ex-British soldier took part in a 24-hour fast to raise funds for victims of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
Irish Post
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Post
The danger of forgetting - and the risk of remembering
IF YOU travel around some areas of Belfast you'll see wall murals celebrating the IRA and other paramilitary groups. They provide one of the simplest ways of letting you know whether you are in a nationalist or a loyalist area. You may feel safer in one than the other. Clearly some people are concerned to preserve a memory of the troubled period, basically the last thirty years of the last century, the destruction and the thousands killed. There is an extraordinary similarity between how the rival cultures commemorate. The murals depict men with guns, or revered cultural symbols. The symbols vary: gravestones, crosses, the Bible, the crown, the familiar interweave of Celtic design as if lifted from the Book of Kells. With so much interest in marking the past you would think that the case for a museum of the Troubles would be easily made but the difficulty is that there are two distinct rival narratives of that past. One says that terrorist insurgents, murderers and saboteurs, attacked the state, gratuitously and fruitlessly, affecting to be fighting a guerrilla war for the self determination of the Irish people and the expulsion of British imperial forces who were oppressing them. The other says that political deadlock over British management of Northern Ireland through its client unionists left decent people no choice but to take up arms and gun down the neighbourhood bobby on patrol. I'm being a little sarcastic about both visions. But the point is that we do not have a museum of the Troubles because the nationalist and unionist versions of history cannot be reconciled. There was to be a Peace Centre on the site of the old Maze prison. This was the prison which housed republican and loyalist militants who'd got caught and a few innocents caught with them, and, in the early days, men interned without trial. Ten men died on hunger strike in that prison, claiming rights which they argued would amount to political status. Our power sharing government had agreed that the Peace Centre would be built but then the Democratic Unionist Party pulled out of the deal, anxious that the centre would become a shrine to the dead hunger strikers and a monument to the republican cause. That was twelve years ago and there has been no development on that site since. The designer of the aborted Peace Centre, was Daniel Libeskind who also designed the Ground Zero memorial in New York city. He has been arguing for the parties to end the deadlock and build the centre and use it as an opportunity for dialogue and reconciliation. Another group operates on the same motivation. Irene Boada, is campaigning to create a Troubles museum in Belfast, preferably in the historic Assembly Building in Waring Street which is currently disintegrating through neglect. She also believes that a museum dedicated to recalling the Troubles would be a focus for meeting and discussion of the past with a view to healing old enmities. But it is the very division she wants to address though the museum which makes it so difficult to get it established. The separate narratives in Northern Ireland are not amenable to being merged into one story that all can agree on. So I have an alternative idea. We shouldn't even try to find common ground between unionism and nationalism. Neither side will give up its history. They went as far as they could in that when they reached the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, though unionists prefer to call it simply, The Agreement. I think we should give up on the idea of a museum being a peace centre. We should give up on it expressing any objective at all. We should just have somewhere that provides the best and most sophisticated chronology of the Troubles, representing every viewpoint - there aren't so many that that would be a problem. Unionists fear that tourists walking into preserved prison cells that had housed republican martyrs would be moved to honour those dead men, perhaps leaving flowers or other tokens. And that appalls them. Organisations representing the concerns of victims of violence are particularly concerned about that prospect, that the men who indulged in sectarian slaughter would be revered as heroes. The prison site provides a possible platform for the stories of most participant groups, for the republicans, loyalists, prison officers, soldiers were there. But most of the killing and the suffering of the innocent happened elsewhere and one can see the danger that their grief and grievances would be overlooked. Yet without a museum the record of the Troubles will be those wall murals and memorials and the rebel songs and the propaganda passed on to another generation which already understands only a simplistic account of those days. Of course, there are others who don't want to remember, for whom it was all just too ugly and bothersome and they have the right to live their lives undistracted by painful reminders. So I'm for having a museum that they can stay away from if they wish and then for wiping the walls free of the garish propaganda that already must make many tourists think that Belfast is proud of its those who once wrecked the city. Malachi O'Doherty's latest book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books See More: Belfast, Northern Ireland, Troubles
Sydney Morning Herald
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
A small country with an epic history for book lovers
Ireland is a country in love with words, both written and spoken, its denizens rightly famous for the craic, that indefinable melange of music and laughter and the joy taken in a simple chat or a tale well-told. It's also there on the walls as we make our way through the crowds to the rambunctious streets of Temple Bar on our first night in Dublin – in a mural with the headline 'Feed Your Head – READ'. There's Brendan Behan cheek-by-jowl with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett. A panel nearby reveals that Ireland has produced four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. And that's without mention of W.B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, and the great James Joyce, whose masterful Ulysses spawned Bloomsday (June 16 every year), one of the biggest literary festivals in the world. This is the land, for goodness' sake, of John Banville, Colm Toibin, Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle, Sally Rooney and Bram Stoker. Which makes our first day in Dublin, before we head south-west for Kilkenny and beyond, such a pleasure; because our first stop is Trinity College's Old Library, which houses the famous Long Room and the Book of Kells. Unarguably one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, the Long Room is 65 metres of burnished wooden bookshelves, normally filled from floor to barrel-vaulted ceiling with 200,000 of the library's oldest tomes. These, however, have been temporarily removed as part of the Old Library Development Project, which aims to improve fire and environmental protections in the library and clean, document and electronically tag the books. Even without them, it's still an alarmingly impressive space. And taking things up a notch since November 2023 is the presence of Gaia, a remarkable illuminated globe that, using detailed NASA imagery of the Earth's surface, shows our planet as it is viewed from space. Sitting about two-thirds of the way along the Long Room, this large but miniature Earth by artist Luke Jerram is suspended in the air, a bright blue ball contrasting beautifully with the polished old oak beams of the library. It is mesmerising, eminently Instagramable, and it will be a crying shame when it is taken down in September 2026 (so get your skates on).
