A Wexford woman has been attracting huge response online after she recorded a song in support of the Garvaghy Road residents.
AWARD winning West Belfast filmmaker Seán Murray will see his first feature drama headlining Belfast Film Festival.
The story of hunger striker Frank Stagg will be told in a new play coming to Belfast at the end of the month.
A NEW mural has been unveiled at Madden's Bar in Belfast of renowned Irish singer and musician Clare Sands.
Lazarus, a work by award-winning West Belfast choreographer Oona Doherty, is set to be revived and performed alongside works from internationally acclaimed choreographers Akram Khan and Liz Roche in an extraordinary new triple-bill by Luail, Ireland’s national, all-island dance company.
2026 is set to be a hectic year for ‘Barnbrack’ founder Alex Quinn and St Genevieve’s High School, who are celebrating their Diamond Jubilee. Alex started out his career as a P.E. teacher iin St Oliver Plunkett's but quickly became involved in the local music scene. He and his two friends Eoin McMahon (RIP) and Jimmy McPeake formed the band ‘Barnbrack’ and went on to great acclaim across the world, and were presented with Gold and Platinum discs. Alex wrote the song ‘Belfast’ in 1984, and earlier this year he recorded a new arrangement featuring St Genevieve’s Choir. Head of Music Siobhan Savage has previously worked with Alex twenty years ago on a recording of his song to Padre Pio featuring two of her students, Mary Bernadette Hardy and Donna Higginson. After a long gap, Alex, Siobhan and some music pupils began to play together at the vigil mass in St Michael’s each week in 2021. Following this, Alex became an honorary member of the Music department and was invited to perform at the Carols at Christmas Concert 2023 and Spring Concert 2025. He brought the idea of a new instrumental and choral arrangement of ‘Belfast’ to St Genevieve’s, who were delighted to assist. The recording, postponed until February 2026, was produced and mastered by renowned uilleann pipe player and maker, Martin Crossin. Alex taught Martin tin whistle in primary school, and Martin went on to pursue a very successful career in Music with his wife, Mary. It took place in the school oratory, and fourteen pupils from the school choir were invited to sing on the track in what was a hugely exciting experience for them and their teachers, Siobhan Savage and Joanne McQullain. It was a fitting and memorable experience to celebrate the fourtieth anniversary of the song and the sixtieth of the school. During Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, Alex was approached to perform on the Gig Rig, and from there he launched the CD. All proceeds went to the Children’s Hospice and Friends of the Cancer Centre. Alex’s performance became one of the unofficial anthems of the week and he already has been asked to return to perform in 2027. The CD features eleven tracks including ‘Mickey Marley's Roundabout’ and others. Last Friday, the pupils who sang on the track met with Alex and heard the recording for the first time. Alex will be performing at St Genevieve’ Christmas Fair on 28 November 2026 and their Gala Concert on March 9 next year. The Music and Drama departments are currently preparing for their production of ‘The Sound of Music’ which will take place from 19-20 October. Copies of the CD will be available from Alex Quinn at St Genevieve’s Christmas fair.
An acclaimed Belfast playwright has expressed frustration with the Arts Council after an application for funding for a play commemorating the McGurk's Bar Bombing was unsuccessful.
A MAJOR new play is set for the Waterfront Hall later this year, based on the tragic events surrounding the McGurks Bar massacre. 15 Catholics, including two children, were killed in the UVF bombing of the North Queen Street pub on the evening of December 4 1971. It was the deadliest attack in Belfast during the Troubles. In the aftermath of the bombing the RUC spread disinformation blaming republicans on the bomb, claiming that it was being handled by members of the IRA in the bar at the time and exploded prematurely. In 1977 UVF man Robert Campbell was sentence to life for his part in the bombing. Since then, the families of those who died in the massacre have fought a long campaign for the truth surrounding the bombing and the subsequent cover-up. The McGurk’s Bar Tragedy by playwright Martin Lynch will take to the Waterfront stage from November 9-14. The play is based on the stories of the 15 victims who died in the bomb. Actos Paddy Jenkins, Conor Grimes, Richard Clemence, James Doran and Thomas Galashan are part of the professional cast. The McGurk’s Bar Tragedy is perhaps Green Shoot Production’s most ambitious project in its 25 year history. It has been written to an epic scale, with a cast of seven professional actors and 30 community actors from the North Belfast area. The story is based on the real events of December 1971 when a bomb went off at McGurk’s on North Queen Street in inner-city North Belfast. This loss of life left a profound wound within the New Lodge that has lasted and resonates to this day. Veteran New Lodge community worker Paddy McCooey described the production as “a momentous idea”. He went on to say, “This play isn’t just about the McGurk’s bomb, it represents all the innocent people who have been killed in bombs during the Troubles, elevating it to a powerful legacy for all bomb victims and their families.”
ONE of the most memorable images of recent Irish history was the release of the Guildford Four. Wrongly convicted of the IRA bombings of Guildford and Woolwich in 1974, the three West Belfast men, Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon and Paddy Armstrong, along with Paddy’s English girlfriend Carole Richardson were sentence to 35 years in prison.
Mary-Elaine Tynan Don Wycherley The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong Mum from the Glen Road, all siblings were born in Belfast, she grew up in Dublin, spent her childhood in Belfast and Cushendall. She says that although she sounds like a Dub, she’s a Belfast woman. I went to school in Dublin and I had a music teacher who was single at the time who then just after I left school married Paddy Armstrong. I became a teacher years later and ended up working with her but I was also writing at the time (I worked with Paddy’s wife Caroline)> Gerard Conlon died in 2017 ? and basically I interviewed Paddy (didn’t really trust the media) Paddy was very media shy, he’s not like Gerry and Paul, he’s a very shy person. When Paddy got out of prison, he couldn’t cope. He was too afraid to go back to Belfast because he was afraid that someone was going to put a bullet in him because he thought that people still thought that he was guilty because what the British judicial system did when they got out they started a whispering campaign that they got out on a technicality. So Paddy was really media shy, so when I met up with him, so when Gerry Conlon died his wife said to me the media are starting to ask for interviews, and I was working for the Sunday independent at the time and she said would you interview him and I said of course, and it was the first interview he did in about 20 years. Based on that we decided to make a documentary, I was working with RTÉ radio at the time (think it was the 25th anniversary of their release).To make the doc we went back to England and went back to Guildford where he had never been until he was arrested, we went back to London where he had been squatting, we went back to the Old Bailey, and we formed a really strong relationship and on the basis of that he asked me to write his memoir and I said no way, I can not take the responsibility, it’s too important a story and I don’t feel qualified to do it. (Agreed) worked on it for the next year and it was a really hard process because Paddy is so shy and only tells the funny stories. He only likes to talk about making prison hooch, having the craic and all the mad stuff, he doesn’t want to talk about the dark stuff like being put in solitary. So it ended up I’d have to interview people who he was in prison with like this guy called Ronnie McCartney who was an IRA man from Belfast who was in prison at the same time at Paddy and was very good to Paddy. The IRA lads were very good to Paddy because they knew he wasn’t one of them and they also saw how soft and gentle he was. Paddy nearly got himself into a lot of trouble in prison because he was a target, you know. He was so shocked when he was in prison, he hadn’t a clue how to cope, so they looked after him and Ronnie in particular looked after him. So I interviewed people like Ronnie for the book. (Also interview Paddy’s solicitor Alastair Logan and prisoner officers._The play is based on the book. So the play we picked key moments out of the memoir and they’re dramatized. I was approached to write a play for the 50th anniversary. I had no idea how to write a play. When I got asked by a local theatre in Clontarf in Dublin. Friend who works for RTE helped her write the first draft and after that I looked for an actor and I had only one guy in mind and it was Don Wycherley because I saw him on the staff in The Abbey and he eventually agreed to work with me on it and he was very non committal and we began working through the draft we had and he read the memoir twice and he felt very strongly that this was a story that could be told on stage, And he and I worked on it and rewrote it together over a year and we ended up with the stage play two years ago that became the play that has now been touring for the last two years. Everything in the play, even though they’re dramatized, they’re Paddy’s words.If people are afraid that it’s going to be grim and dark, it is that, but it is also really funny, because Paddy is hilarious. He’s got that black Belfast sense of humour. Don plays all the various different people through the eyes of Paddy. I think it works really well as a one man show.I felt such a responsibility to tell Paddy’s story, to do it justice after such an injustice was done to him. I also wanted people to remember him and know him in a way that most people don’t. They felt like they know Gerry through In The Name of The Father and through various other things that Gerry did over the years. They didn’t know Paddy and I wanted them to know Paddy, the man who had this awful injustice but is so much more than this. He is hilarious and forgiving and kind and he’s loving. People have been so moved by it. We had people last night who have seen it for the third and fourth time. We’re going back to the Lyric because we sold out last time in the Naughton Studio, we are bringing it back to the main stage. (Been around Ireland and England with Paddy’s story, going to US and Edinburgh next year.) Dublin audiences, unless they’re from the North, it’s a story to them and they invest in it as a piece of theatre and they love it. Northern audiences sometimes they are watching something that they remember. Northern audiences they go quiet and they first show in the Lyric it was really disarming because Don, who is on the stage, he’s talking his energy from the audience, and he’s going ‘they’ve gone deftly silence, they don’t like it’ but they’re listening intently and they’re feeling it and they’re remembering, but they laugh in the right places and they gasp in the right places, but the feelings are different and the experiences are different and they jumped up at the end and gave an amazing response. But in England it’s a different experience again because often there are people who went through what it was like to be Irish in England in the seventies. And they’re kind of retraumatised. One woman told us that she was in London when it all happened and she was walking by a park and she got pulled into the park and got raped. She had red hair and freckles and looked very Irish and the Irish were persona non grata at the time so she couldn’t go to the police because she felt that she wouldn’t be believed and she said that was what it was like to be Irish in London in the seventies and eighties. You couldn’t be safe being Irish so she never reported that crime. She said I know this play is about Paddy but it is also about what it was like to be Irish at a certain period in history. And she said this has given me comfort.To me it has been the greatest honour of my career to tell this story because it means different things to different people and it’s a true privilege and I ask people to come and see it.
A Twinbrook man has launched a new children's book, aimed at kids aged between three and nine.
AWARD-winning and sell-out production The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong, presented by Wooden Bridge Productions and starring acclaimed actor Don Wycherley, is returning to the Lyric Theatre, Belfast main stage from Thursday 10 to Sunday 13 September 2026.
THE Lyric Theatre is delighted to announce that Brian Friel’s acclaimed masterpiece Faith Healer will return to Belfast from 10 October to 14 November, as part of the theatre’s 75th anniversary celebrations and Belfast International Arts Festival, in a major new production with Olivier Award-winning actor Conleth Hill alongside Lisa Dwyer-Hogg, Chris McCurry and directed by Emma Jordan.
A WEST Belfast girl is celebrating after a first-place success in tin whistle at the recent Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann All Ireland Fleadh Cheoil in Belfast.
IT’S hard to believe that Pulling Moves was on our screens 23 years ago.
