MACROOM, a sleepy Munster town, twenty four miles west of Cork, is an unlikely candidate as the Irish Wooddstock, but that is what it has become as the serene grounds of Macroom Castle are now the established venue for the country's greatest annual open-air rock concert.
Muiris Mac Conghail and D. R. Lysaght remember David Thornley
Programmes
AT TEN O'CLOCK in the evening of Tuesday, June 6, RTE 2 will start its public life with an episode of an anodyne American series called The Streets of San Francisco. The hour of liberation for the single-channel areas is at hand. The denizens of Limerick and Galway should not be knitting garlands of roses for their liberators just yet though, because they'll only be getting an hour to an hour and a half's viewing a night from RTE 2 until November, when full evening broadcasting starts.
ONCE UPON A TIME there were flowers in fields and gardens, and trees and landscapes, and men and young girls sat on the ground underneath the trees and laughed, and made love. And where the land went into the sea waves broke upon the shore, and children played in the sand, and men and women walked along the beach. And the sun shone down on it all, and the wind blew, and clouds moved across the sky, and the leaves twisted and the trees swayed, and the surface of the water was troubled. By Bruce Arnold
The Irish lifestyle is fatal. We have adopted the behaviour patterns of affluent consumerism and it is slowly but inexorably killing us. We eat the wrong things, we inhale the wrong air, we drink the wrong drinks, we take little exercise and we impose on ourselves a way of life full of stress and torment.
"Joseph and The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat" has already bought Noel Pearson a small castle in Killiney and may yet rescue him from the depredations of "Elvis" and "Plain Porter." More appropriately the show should now be known as "Joseph and The Amazing Bank of Ireland Chequebook."
By unanimous agreement, unemployment is now the country's most daunting problem. Yet there are no reliable figures on the number of people out of work. Brendan Dowling unravels the bewildering statistical information and describes the dimension of the problem.
The prisoners, by this time three hundred of them, including Kieron Nugent the first such protester who, if he had not taken a stand, would have been released last September, refused to slop out. When their pots were full, they were allowed to overflow. Or the prisoners would use other receptacles, such as their shoes. The contents were hurled out of windows or poured through the cell spy-holes.
"IS THERE A REPRESENTATIVE from The Irish Times here?" asked Father Piaras O'Duill at the recent enquiry in Dublin's Liberty Hall into allegations of abuse and torture of prisoners in Ireland and England. No reply. He asked if representatives of the other morning or evening papers were there. No reply. The circle of public indifference to torture allegations and the news media's reflection to that indifference was making itself evident.
The Fine Gael Ard Fheis was a deserved success for Garret FitzGerald, who has devoted more energy to resuscitating the party in the last 10 months than anybody has done in the last 40 years.