Breandan O Doibhlin: Pathfinder.

A few things to explain at the outset: My first difficulty is public speaking in English and to do so with my Cork city patois in Derry is a bit rich. A second difficulty I had was with the subject: the notion that a prophet would be recognised in his own country and while he still alive is unusual by international standards and mind-boggling in the light of Dr. Johnson's remark when he said of us that: 'the Irish are a funny race, they rarely speak well of each other.' In any case this is not a 'This is Your Life' celebrity occasion, the vulgarity of self-interested promotion does not surround 6 Doibhlin's message. In other words, he does not have a cult following, but a readership and a discipleship based on the democratic Christian principles of free will and choice, not promotion and fashion. And therefore, it is the message I wish to examine, rather than the messenger. The message rather than the messenger, because the notion of admiration, let alone reverence for teachers and mentors is long since gone. Sports stars and pop stars are the great celebrities. The wearing of the footballer's jersey number is not discipleship. It is democracy gone mad, leaving no room for an elite or an aristocracy of talent or of intellect. At a time when the educational landscape of this country is succumbing to the demands of consumerism it is timely and advisable to consider those concepts which we have inherited, but which are no longer fashionable, considered even divisive, concepts which have become dumbed down or neglected in the helter-skelter world of the eternal present: such concepts as 'tradition', 'culture', 'nationality' and 'humanity', much more than words, which 6 Doibhlin has spent a lifetime interpreting

Bliain an Bhandé/Year of the Goddess by Gabriel Rosenstock (Review)

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Doubtya boy!

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The religious mind of Maynooth's Gaelic manuscripts

By a happy coincidence the byline for Maynooth College's bicentenary celebrations, 'for faith and fatherland', is a precise description of that last great flowering of native spirituality during the Baroque Age (1600-1700). James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, leader of the 1579 rebellion, insisted that 'zeal for God's honour and their own country' was the rebels' prime motivation, just as Hugh O'Neill declared in 1615 that all his acts of defiance against the crown were 'in defence of the Catholic faith and of his fatherland'. From the defeat at Kinsale in 1601 to the Famine of1847-8, the old Gaelic order suffered political, military, social and economic disaster. Paradoxically, and perhaps consequentially, no other period produced such a volume of native poetry and prose, of such literary and intellectual merit. The native bardic tradition, isolated for the most part from the mainstream of the medieval Continental tradition by the conservatism of the bardic caste for some 500 years, from the coming of the Normans to the defeat at Kinsale, rose to the post-Tridentine challenge and developed a powerful Gaelic recusant literature, through its own Continental college movement in the first instance and later through the influence of returned missionaries, who brought the new literary themes and techniques home with them

Trí Dhán.

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Faoiseamh a Gheobhadsa.

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"Mairg a Dhéanfadh Deimhin dá Dhúchas": Ceird na Beathaisnéise

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Ecce Homo

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Gearrcaigh nó Gliogair: Dírbheathaisnéisí an Bhlascaoid faoi chló an Bhearla.

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