COMMON Threads, the recent talk by Dr Manal Shqair and Dr Niamh Coffey on Palestinian and Irish women’s activism and resistance in their countries’ struggles against colonial occupation and oppression attracted a large, appreciative audience who engaged with the subject and asked pertinent questions.

ANYONE reading this has either seen or heard of the film Reservoir Dogs. The classic mob movie features a gang of criminals stuck in a room waiting for information that never arrives which leads to increasing tension and a grand crescendo of operatic violence. What fewer people know is Quentin Tarantino’s gangster classic is simply Samuel Beckett’s Absurdist Play Waiting for Godot reimagined in a mobster setting.

IT IS perhaps the human condition to take for granted your good fortune. However, I have no excuse for failing to regularly remind myself that for the past 30 years, I’ve been able to call Ireland’s best-kept secret my homeplace.