This world can be a cruel and lonesome place sometimes, writes Donal O’Keeffe. Maybe there are worse things we might try than kindness now and then.
I’ve been thinking a bit about Bob Dylan’s granny lately.
Florence Sara Stone (nee Edelstein)...
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...
November 1833. As the night skies explode in blazing light over America’s Deep South, the slavers on one plantation – terrified of the end of the world – attempt to make restitution to those they have enslaved.
Every year, in...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
“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...
