WHEN you hear that not only has the BBC co-funded a documentary about Bobby Sands but it also has Irish Times Pontificator General Fintan O’Toole featuring extensively the alarm bells go off. But Bobby Sands: 66 Days is worth the ticket price when it goes on general release in August. Free article

DR LAURENCE McKEOWN, the playwright and author who endured 70 days on the 1981 H-Blocks Hunger Strike, is just back from South Africa where his play about dealing with the past, Those You Pass on the Street, was selected for this year’s National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, the largest and oldest arts festival in South Africa. Free article

‘CALLING DENIS NAUGHTEN – Irish Government Communications Minister’. Rupert Murdoch is on the march again and he is not alone in buying up Irish media firms but (as I write) we have yet to hear from anyone in the Irish Government on their vision or policies for a pluralist, open Irish media market. Free article

IN THE SMALL VALLEY of Frongoch, in north Wales, 400 people gathered on 11 June to mark the 100th anniversary of the arrival almost 1,800 Irish POWs following the 1916 Easter Rising. Free article

These were the words of the first international radio broadcast from Ireland. They were sent from O’Connell Street, Dublin, in Morse code tapped out on a transmitter by a Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army. The building was then Reis’s shop, 10-11 Lower O’Connell Street, at the corner of Abbey Street, now the Grand Central Bar. Free article

THE STRATEGY of the British state is to prevent any ‘Uncomfortable Conversation’ about its role in perpetuating, sustaining and prolonging the conflict in Ireland. Free article

RECONCILIATION PROCESSES must be inclusive and owned by all. As a process they create a space that invites us all – republican, unionist, British or Irish – to make sense of our history, to understand others, to challenge and be challenged, with the common objective of building a better future that promotes equality and which protects the rights of all. Free article

TÁ BRÉAGA ANN, bréaga damnaithe agus staitisticí. Ach, i bhfianaise a d’fhoilsigh an Príomh-Oifig Staidrimh, is féidir linn figiúirí oifigiúla a chur leis an liosta seo. Free article

GROCERY SHOPPING is one of the most tedious of household tasks most people dread. Pushing a wonky trolley up and down aisles in a supermarket just isn’t anybody’s idea of fun but it has to be done. Free article

DUBLIN’S annual Pride Parade parade in June saw signs saying “Queers Against Israeli Pinkwashing” as members of Ireland’s LGBT community showed their anger at Israel using a veneer of acceptance of gay people to gloss over its ongoing brutal occupation of Palestine. Free article

Brexit, Fisheries, Chilcot Inquiry Report and Code of Conduct for Commissioners Free article

THE SILVER-HAIRED WOMAN is standing in the sitting room of her modest home, a large two-storey farmhouse built in the perfunctory tradition of the few native families who managed to hold land after the Anglo-Norman incursions into their region, acknowledging the location of her family domain in the picturesque Suir Valley in south Tipperary. Free article