Public Lecture

Thursday 21 February
Davenport Hotel, Merrion Square, Dublin 2, 8 p.m.

Studies Quarterly Review and the Iona Institute are pleased to announce our second Public Lecture. The speaker will be Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology, University of Cambridge.

Clergy, Writers and Intellectuals

Let us begin this analysis of Northern Ireland’s Ian Paisley by briefly making reference to another deeply divided society, namely, South Africa. In The Last Trek – a New Beginning Nobel Peace Prize winner, F.W. De Klerk, outlines his criticisms of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa shortly before its findings were published. He did so because he thought that the Commission’s report was likely to fail adequately to account for each community’s perception of the truth. De Klerk invited the readers of his autobiography to look sympathetically upon the Afrikaners’ right to national self-determination, which, he admitted, ultimately lost its moral direction in the dreadful policy of apartheid.

Contemporary Ireland is sunk in gloom, so we need laughter and entertainment, with a good analysis of our plight and hope that things really will get better.

There, we should be very grateful to the Democratic Unionist Party and the Paisleyite tradition in Northern Ireland, because they gave us the only truly juicy scandal of recent times. It was a relief to contemplate the straightforward misfortunes of Iris and Peter Robinson. The misdeeds that came to light are, in themselves, reassuringly traditional: money, sex, politics and planning permissions.

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