Emma Byrne – illustratör

What makes an Irish home? Is it the neatly folded wrapping paper saved for another Christmas? Or the pressure cooker that you can’t throw out but you haven’t used since 1987?Séamus Ó Conaill, author of You Know You’re Irish When ..., examines the artifacts of an Irish home, from ash trays on back windowsill to the potpourri gathering dust in the ‘good room’. The list includes many newer objects that make our 21st century homes more Irish as ever!  So, is your home as truly Irish as you think?

‘A terrible beauty is born’WB Yeats’s poignant words have come to immortalise the complex legacy of the Easter Rising, 1916. The poetry that emerged at this time of upheaval in Ireland gave voice to the thoughts of a generation. Yeats’s poem, ‘Easter 1916’, sits alongside selected works of other major poets of the era. These include Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett, who were executed for their part in the Rising.In the aftermath of the Rising an outpouring of poetry also expressed the shock and grief of literary figures such as Padraic Colum, Francis Ledwidge, Eva Gore-Booth, James Stephens, Dora Sigerson Shorter and Seán O’Casey. Rebels, soldiers, honorary Irishmen, sympathisers and exiles all held up a mirror, in verse, to the events, beliefs and desires bound up in 1916.

Fifteen-year-old Samuel Scott died while building the Titanic. As the ship sails to her doom, his ghost moves restlessly alongside the passengers and crew: Frederick Fleet: the young look-out who spotted the iceberg and who survived in a life-boat with (the unsinkable) Molly Brown; Howard Hartley Wallace: the heroic band-leader who played ragtime music as the freezing waters lapped at his feet; Harold Bride: the junior radio operator whose messages echoed on, long after the ship had disappeared to its icy grave …