Sheila was 19 when she was imprisoned in 1976 for the crime of 'falling pregnant'. She was enslaved and subjected to appalling cruelty, and her baby was stolen. Had not her Daddy rescued her from the prison to which...
“No one may dare alter the truths of the Holocaust, no matter how noble his motives.” By Donal O’Keeffe.
Boy did John Boyne get his answer.
On Twitter earlier this month, the Irish author most famous for his schmaltzy 2006 international...
Bridget Dolan was 26 years old when she entered the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. It was 1946, and Bridget was pregnant, alone, and terrified. She had no idea she would one day become a figure of considerable historical...
John Prine often sang about going to heaven, and now, as he makes that final journey, some fans and friends - among them President Higgins - share their thoughts with Donal O’Keeffe.
I think the first time I heard a...
On Bob Dylan’s 75th birthday, Donal O’Keeffe recalls a meeting with a man Dylan worshipped as a hero.
Liam Clancy was growling at me.
Beneath the cap, there was a decided twinkle in his eyes, but the growl was formidable and...
The Wrens of the Curragh are only the best-known example of outcast women on the outskirts of Irish garrison towns, writes Donal O’Keeffe.
For over half a century, the Wrens of the Curragh were a community of outcast women living...
I kept wondering last week if I was the only person in Ireland who had seen Stephen Frears’ 2013 Oscar-nominated comedy-drama 'Philomena', writes Donal O’Keeffe.
Last week, the child and family agency Tusla revealed that - between 1946 and 1969...
by Donal O’Keeffe
“You stitch-up scumbag!” roared the acquitted man at the prosecuting Garda. “You stitch-up bastard! I’ll get you again, you stitch-up c***”!”
At the back of the courtroom in the Central Criminal Court, a 31 year old woman broke...
“I won’t survive another winter on the streets,” Kathleen O’Sullivan told me, as she lay in the doorway in which she would die a month later.
It was a cold Friday night in early November, and I was out on...
The Eighth Amendment was never really about abortion.
That might seem a strange thing to say in the only country in the democratic world to have a constitutional ban on abortion, but the fact that 23,000 pregnant Irish women...
