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Oct 21, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Aidan Harte
How conflict over land ownership shaped conflict over Ireland During Irish summers of the 1980s, my brother and I would buy lollipops in the local pub, which functioned by day as a newsagent and grocery. It was a shebeen really, little bigger than a confession box with greasy fly catchers dangling from the ceiling like stalactites. If we gave the ancient proprietor any backtalk, she ejected us with no lollies, screaming, “Your relative got my relative hanged!”That hanging occurred in 1824.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
theamericanconservative.com | Aidan Harte
Joe Biden has a new neighbor. Pennsylvania Avenue’s latest attraction is a 58-foot-long anti-war monument. A Soldier’s Journey, a frieze composed of 38 larger-than-life realistic figures, tells the story of one American “doughboy” from enlistment to return. A decade in the making by Sabin Howard, this bronze Iliad is epic in scale, operatic in tone and beautifully executed. Notwithstanding these qualities, discovering an indictment of war’s folly here is surprising.
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May 17, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Aidan Harte
The art establishment has revived competent drawing in spite of itself Stop me if you’ve heard it before. A Filipino, a Romani Gypsy, a Sikh and a Black woman walk into the Tate Modern … Actually, it’s no joke. This is the 2024 Turner Prize shortlist. That all of this year’s contenders are British minorities is not unusual. Last year’s shortlist consisted of two gay men, a Black woman and a woman who said, “I’m Jewish and I’m Chinese. I’m also neither…”. The year before that?
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May 8, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Aidan Harte
For all its pretentiousness, the Venice Biennale still hints towards higher truths The historian William Dalrymple once visited Mar Saba, an ancient monastery north of the Dead Sea, to research a Byzantine saint.
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Apr 13, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Aidan Harte
The chisel of the Irish-German sculptor Imogen Stuart has fallen silent. 96 years old, she died last week surrounded by four generations of her family in Dublin. The President of Ireland paying tribute to an artist he admired and knew, said that the nation is “deeply indebted” to her. And so it is – but the Ireland that Imogen Stuart came to in 1949 was not the Ireland that mourns her now. That Ireland is lost, as lost as the Weimar Germany into which she was born in 1927 is lost.
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Jan 19, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Brian Kaller |Aidan Harte |John Lloyd
When five-and-six-year-old schoolchildren were stabbed on a Dublin street on 23 November 2023—allegedly by an Algerian immigrant—the resulting riots made headlines around the world. Those riots, however, were the result of tensions over immigration that had been building under the surface for years. In a recent survey, 75 percent of Irish people stated that they believe that the country has let in too many immigrants.
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Dec 12, 2023 | 
lawliberty.org | Aaron Rhodes |Graham McAleer |Daniel Mahoney |Aidan Harte
It would be a shame if the teachings of American sociologist Edward Shils faded out of discourse in the humanities and social sciences. Shils, who died in 1995, was considered one of the leading social scientists, and among the most learned people in the world. He grew up in Philadelphia, where his father, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, worked in a cigar factory. He was a Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
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Dec 10, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Aidan Harte |Juan P. Villasmil |Lachlan Peters
Dublin’s riots scored the bigger headlines, but Ireland’s biggest disaster last month was surely the futuristic climate-change docudrama Tomorrow Tonight. “Amateurish, smug and possibly the worst TV programme anyone has ever made,” was the verdict of Eilís O’Hanlon in the Irish Independent.
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Dec 8, 2023 | 
lawliberty.org | Adam J. MacLeod |Daniel Mahoney |Aidan Harte |Theodore Dalrymple
Rights have gone off the rails. The anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a fitting occasion to consider how they were derailed and how they may be placed back on track. The Declaration contains both the source of the problem and the intellectual resources to fix it. Crafted amidst the echoes of a classical jurisprudential tradition that associated rights with just action, the Declaration rests partly on a solid foundation of natural justice.
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Dec 8, 2023 | 
lawliberty.org | Elizabeth Matthew |Daniel Mahoney |Aidan Harte |Theodore Dalrymple
The baby bust afoot in the West is getting attention from politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle. Panic about falling birthrates now transcends ideological divides. The longstanding progressive contention is that, per mainstream feminist Jill Filipovic, “women are having fewer babies because they have more choices.” But this notion is given the lie by studies showing that women today are having not just fewer babies than women used to, but fewer babies than they want.
