I have just returned from Hebron in the West Bank, a city where nearly sixty Palestinians have been extra-judicially executed by Israeli forces since the end of September 2015. On my last stint in Hebron, West Bank, while doing check point duty one morning one of my team mates overheard two very small children chatting: … Read more
SINGLE. That’s what my train ticket says. It sticks out in the rain like a young tongue between the teeth of an old machine’s slot. Besotted as I am with the tingle to mingle, naturally I snatch it whispering, ‘Thanks a lot.’ Koreans claim a girl is gold till she’s old. Silver tarnishes on the … Read more
Earlier this month Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed into law ‘The Alabama Human Protection Act’ passed by both the Alabama House and Senate entitled. This law, which does not take immediate effect, bans all abortions except: …activities if done with the intent to save the life or preserve the health of an unborn child, remove … Read more
Recent Local and European elections witnessed an electoral Green Tide, especially in Dublin, where Ciaran Cuffe topped the European poll. But this week Dubliners are contending with a Brown Tide, of shit, after overspill from the Ringsend Wastewater Plant. It is far from an isolated example of this government’s environmental negligence. What makes it all … Read more
We don’t discuss white America’s common pathology. What we’ve begun, within limits, are discussions on racism, bigotry, white nationalism, and other disorders of the mind. Ever so guarded, these conversations are restricted to speculation about just who is a racist, a bigot, or a white supremacist, and always in the mode of, ‘us and them,’ … Read more
The cruellest aspect of protracted displacement is a descent into the realms of collective forgetfulness, in places where social injustice and political abandonment are normalised. Fresh from her fourth visit to Lebanon, author and activist Bruna Kadletz sees the Palestinian cause being relegated more and more to the margins of global concern. In the autumn … Read more
Sail-Rail passage between Dublin and London currently takes about eight hours – but could be slashed to under four. The emergence of what the Swede’s call ‘flight shame’ in this era of Climate Change, may motivate many to look for alternatives on what is Europe’s busiest air corridor. I – Outset An era of climate … Read more
Repost… The year is 1500 and Jesus Christ returns – to the city of Seville in Spain. There he performs a sequence of miracles, whereupon he is arrested and hauled before the Grand Inquisitor, as imagined by Ivan Karamazov – a character from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1880 novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In his infinite mercy he … Read more
I was pretty sure I was going to die, sooner rather than later, one midsummer’s night in Libya’s desert. It was 1988. A cousin of Colonel Ghaddafi, a military man, was driving us to meet the Great Man himself. In the darkness, we had turned left off the tarmacadamed main road between Benghazi and Tripoli, … Read more
A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock. Charles Lamb In 1954, when I was aged nine, my youthful uncle, aged twenty-five, returned to Ireland from … Read more
As French President, François Mitterrand enjoyed his fair share of sumptuous feasts in the haute cuisine tradition. His enduring esteem reflects a wider French anxiety, in an era of Globalisation, expressed by Pascal Ory, as to whether French cuisine will be ‘all that remains when everything else has been forgotten?’[i] Thus, in 1996, for his … Read more
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Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently called for more stringent Internet privacy and election laws saying, ‘We need a more active role for governments and regulators.’[i] In advocating what amounts to censorship, he seems to have at least awoken to the Promethean beast he has summoned. It opens a dangerous vista, however, and is hypocritical for … Read more
Cassandra’s Cultural Roundabout is a light-hearted take on the cultural scene of Dublin and beyond, containing the odd acerbic note. Make Merry We know precisely how fine a documentary film maker Sé Merry Doyle is from our experience working with him on his short film, ‘Cassandra Voices – the Hard Copy.’ Sé put two chronically … Read more
Last January, the Minister for Education, Joe McHugh, invited views from the public on the current system of granting exemptions to pupils from the compulsory study of Irish, following debate around the current regime. The Irish language organisations want exemptions to be kept to a minimum; they have long complained that these are granted too … Read more
In the year of our Lord 2019, what remained engrained was an émigré from the hoi omphaloi of confusion and strife. The Easter in question came late on the calendar but much like the highly controversial transubstantiation, the bitter end of Holy Week started as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall … Read more
In the time it took him to close the three yards of separation between us, a well-dressed young man with a Saints ballcap pulled down low was holding a Glock 19 semi-automatic to my head. I’d been hypervigilant for three weeks after a New Orleans tarot card reader at the Golden Leaves Bookstore divined bad … Read more
Nowhere that I have visited has quite the charm of Umbria, Italy’s throbbing green heart, and only land-locked province apart from the Alpine region. Along its horizon, verdant hills culminate in fortified settlements that act as sentinels over fecund valleys, where wheat fields and vineyards have long sustained a saturnine populace. The lumbering waters of … Read more
At Cassandra Voices we believe in contrasting the original work of our contemporary contributors with accomplished authors from yesteryear. Perennial favourites of such mastery, they appear as fresh and modern as the day they were first published. For our May edition we bring you Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’. A short story from 1948, and notorious … Read more
