Dance to the Music of Time – Frank McNally on a forgotten Irish-American revolutionary
The jig that welcomed General Humbert to Co Mayo can still be heard in Kilcummin and Amsterdam
The mystery of a once ubiquitous Dublin symbol
Fanlight statuettes were a nod to politics, insurance policies and personal tragedies
Stairway to Heaven – Frank McNally on how our favourite painting became a TikTok sensation
New generation is transfixed by The Meeting on the Turret Stairs
Pier Pressure: Frank McNally on a night camping at General Humbert’s landing spot
An amphibious invasion boded ill after a foray to liberate some 1798 spirit
Valentino’s Irish Valentine: Frank McNally on the extraordinary Winifred Kimball Shaughnessy
She took an exotic name and wed the unlucky-in-love Hollywood heart-throb Rudolph
How Irish kindness in a war-ravaged French town inspired unknown writer Samuel Beckett
Short poem in The Irish Times was too obscure for some, but Beckett’s time in Saint-Lô warranted a verse with deep meaning
Sinkholes, the unlikely link between Monaghan and Montparnasse
Magheracloone holds the only Irish deposits of gypsum, while the French capital was extensively mined to make plaster of Paris
Frank McNally: My 135km journey in Ireland without a car
This ferociously busy route was clearly not built with pedestrians in mind and hitchhiking didn’t seem safe to attempt
Dredging Moate: Frank McNally on an Anglo-Mexican surrealist with deep roots in Westmeath
Mayan folk beliefs mingled with Leonora Carrington’s inherited Celtic ones in a heady concoction
Soul Traders – Frank McNally on the battle to save a famous Dublin marketplace
Location in the Liberties ‘approved as part of a wider community regeneration project intended to provide a permanent market and community space’
Even Dublin’s seagulls took a moment to pause as the solar eclipse filled the sky
The event brought strangers together as few things do at the city’s numerous vantage points
Joni Mitchell glamourised hitchhiking, but she clearly never tried it in Mullingar
Closure was provided 41 years later when a driver from the Westmeath town got me to a screen showing the All-Ireland final
Forty Shades of Black? Frank McNally on our new agricultural crop, sun-harvesting
This dramatic change in the landscape around Dublin had somehow passed me by
The Last Word: gravestone honorifics and epitaphs that get lost in translation
Plus a suspicious detail about a banshee’s ominous cries
Noises Off: Frank McNally on a famous tale of the banshee
Extraordinary sound – ‘neither voice nor instrument’ – heralded baron’s death in 1801