Tag Archives: book

THE full programme for the 15th Ennis Book Club Festival was announced this week. This year’s festival will be a hybrid of online events in March with live events taking place in April and September. As always Ennis Book Club Festival 2021 will offer opportunities to engage with favourite authors and features an additional programme of events for younger readers. While the festival cannot welcome book lovers to Ennis this March as ever, it will provide plenty of events to stimulate discussion and inspire reading, from the comfort of the couch. Commenting on the programme for the 2021 Ennis Book Club Festival, Artistic Director Dani Gill, says, “We have had to re-imagine the festival several times this year with the changing circumstances, and while people are having to remain at home, we hope that at least, there have been some good books on the go, and that people will engage with our online offerings next month. “A lot of work …

A CLARE woman is flavour of the month after becoming the inspiration behind a new recipe book backed by celebrity chef Darina Allen. The time-perfected desserts created by the residents of Mowlam Healthcare will be remembered forever in the ‘Nursing Home Bake Off’ publication. But the idea to gather a collection of residents’ favourite recipes from across Ireland was inspired by the trailblazing baking skills of a 91-year-old woman in Ennis Nursing Home. Ardent hurling fan and Liverpool FC supporter, Cissie Collins, bakes scones and apple cakes for fellow residents during baking demonstrations hosted by her every Wednesday. It soon became evident that there was a large group of enthusiastic bakers throughout the group – sowing the seed of a book with recipes from bygone days. Cissie is one of the 51 kitchen-savvy pensioners living in Mowlam Healthcare nursing homes across Ireland who contributed recipes ­– some dating back three generations – and features on its front cover. “I haven’t …

IF there is one thing to take from this pandemic, according to Father Harry Bohan, it’s that we cannot return to what was ‘normal’, the future has to be different from the past. Rearing The Future: Is The Future Our Responsibility? Reflections on Irish Society and its Institutions During And Post Pandemic is the title of a new publication from Fr Bohan. A distinguished observer of Irish society for many years, he feels that Covid-19 has thrown the country off the path it was on, and that it was necessary. “Covid-19 was an unwelcome visitor in the spring of this year. This long later it looks like it’s going to continue for some time to come. Any attempt to fully interpret it is premature, but something that struck me straight away is that our post Covid world should be very different to what we came from. I think most people would agree that the future has to be different from …

AN Ennis man who has been soldiering on with the compilation of a history of the Old Military Barracks is making a final appeal for information to be included in the publication. William Crowley has been working on the publication since 2016 and it is hoped to be complete later this summer. He has already been inundated with information, as people from all over the world have got in touch with stories about growing up in the area on the Kilrush Road. With the book now nearing completion, William is putting out a last call to anyone who may have photographs, stories or any information they would like to see included in the publication. “I’ve got a good bit of detail over the last few years and I’m just putting the last details together. At this stage I wanted to make a final push for those who may have been sitting on the fence about getting involved to get in …

A MINISTER for Justice who slept with a gun under his pillow, the very nemesis of Charles Haughey and the founder of a political party that exercised influence way beyond its size throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Des O’Malley wasn’t struggling for material for his book Conduct Unbecoming: A Memoir. Much of O’Malley’s career was defined by his enmity with a certain former taoiseach, an era that was revisited in the recent RTÉ mini-series, Haughey. O’Malley feels it was a relatively fair exploration of the time. “You have to take it as a drama, rather than a factual documentary, but a great deal of it is factual. It is of course based on fact but, for dramatic purposes, certain things are written into it and the chronology of some of the things changes, they happened in a different order. But I thought it was a fair enough representation of the atmosphere at the time, the atmosphere of fear and intimidation.” …

THE day Siobhan Mungovan started walking was the day her father, Noel almost keeled over. Aged three and diagnosed with Spina Bifida, walking wasn’t on the list of what was expected of the now 28-year-old Connolly girl, who, these days, works in the planning department of Clare County Council. Siobhan, who along with Clare Champion journalist, Carol Byrne, has written Me and My Backbone, My Journey with Spina Bifida detailing her life with Spina Bifida, clearly recalls the circumstances surrounding her first, albeit unsteady, steps. “Dad roared out to Mam, ‘where are my fags, Ger?’ Mam didn’t take a blind bit of notice because he’s always roaring for something. Lo and behold, out of nowhere, Siobhan gets up with a wobble and takes herself across the floor to get the fags,” Siobhan recalled, ahead of the book launch on November 7. “He was shocked, obviously, that I walked but he was more shocked that I knew what fags were,” she …

MARTIN Sixsmith, the journalist and author, whose book inspired the critically acclaimed and Oscar nominated film Philomena, will appear at the Ennis Book Club Festival just days after the Academy Awards ceremony. He is just one of many well known authors and personalities who will visit the town in March for the popular festival. Ciana Campbell of the Ennis Book Club Festival voluntary committee said they are delighted to welcome Sixsmith to Ennis, along with the other participants. “It’s all taken off for him; it’s been brilliant so we are looking forward to welcoming him. In fact he seems very enthusiastic about coming here. He will be here just after the Oscars ceremony, but Oscar or no Oscar the success has been phenomenal for him,” she outlined. In 2009 Sixsmith wrote The Lost Child of Philomena Lee about the forcible separation of a Limerick mother and child by the nuns of an Irish convent during the 1950s, and the subsequent …

To this day, Pat Guthrie vividly remembers the summer of 1954.  His father purchased a battery radio for the princely sum of £16. It was also the year he listened to his first All-Ireland hurling final radio commentary, leading 60 years later to his book which chronicles the careers of RTE’s radio sports commentators. IT was the first weekend in September and John Guthrie headed the few miles down the road from his thatched home in Commons North to Corofin village, to Pat Reidy’s bicycle repair shop on Church Street. It was a chore he was growing accustomed to, having the recently-purchased wet and dry radio battery charged and at the ready. That weekend was particularly special for the Guthrie family, as they tuned into their first All-Ireland hurling final radio broadcast. It was a final that elevated Ring to legendary status as he won his eighth All-Ireland medal, eclipsing the record shared in hurling by Kilkenny’s Sim Walton, Dick …