Monday 29th March 2010

Voices from the Grave

In a dramatic break with the unwritten laws of Northern Ireland paramilitary omerta two leading figures from opposing loyalist and republican sides revealed their involvement in bombings shootings and killings to academic researches from Boston College in America. The Republican is Brendan Hughes one of the IRA chief organizers and confidant of Gerry Adams and from the loyalist side David Ervine former UVF volunteer and then leader of the Progressive Unionist Party. Both gave these interviews to Boston College on the understanding that they would not be made public except by their consent or on their death. David Ervine died suddenly in 2007 from a heart attack and Brendan Hughes died in 2008. Journalist and author Ed Moloney who has previously written A Secret History of the IRA was given access to the interviews done by Boston College with Hughes and Ervine and the startling revelations are published in his new book Voices from the Grave, and Ed Moloney joined Pat in studio.

Pay Talks

It really was a marathon session. Government officials and trade union leaders talked for 19 hours in a bid to hammer out a deal on public sector pay and reform.

Talks are now set to resume at Croke Park at 7 p.m. tonight but according to Kieran Mulvey head of the Labour Relations Commission last night’s session “brought a lot of the issues a long way”. Martin Wall, Industrial Relations Correspondent with the Irish Times joined Pat this morning.

Mullingar Apartments

A one bed apartment on sale in Mullingar, Co Westmeath for just under seventy thousand euro. More than nine hundred prospective buyers queued over the weekend to have a look at them and to hand over their deposits. Valerie Cox was there to tell us what was happening.

Weather

Sunday coming may be Easter Sunday, the daffodils may finally have started to bloom but maybe we shouldn’t lose the heavy clothes just yet because snow is forecast to hit parts of the country this week. And this after the coldest winter in Ireland for thirty years.

Gerald Fleming from Met Eireann was on the line to give us more

Hand in the Fire

Author: Hugo Hamilton
Publisher : Fourth Estate

As a young boy, growing up in Dublin, Hugo Hamilton struggled with the question of what it means to be speckled. The speckled people were, in his father's words, "the new Irish, partly from Ireland, partly from somewhere else". His father, a fierce nationalist, demanded that his children speak Irish. His mother, a soft-spoken woman marked by her family's refusal to accept Nazi anti-Semitism, talks to her children in the language of her homeland, Germany. Hugo wanted to speak English. English is, after all, what all the other children in Dublin spoke. The Speckled People explored the way that one could feel like an outsider as a resulte of your parents’ background. In his latest novel, Hugo explores the immigrant experience in Ireland. Hand in the Fire tells the story of Vid Cosic, a Serbian immigrant living in Dublin who says astutely, at the very start of the book ‘You have a funny way of doing things here’

Hugo Hamilton came into studio to talk to Pat this morning

Vladimir Jablokov

Music today comes from Vladimir Jablokov, leader of the Slovak Festival Orchestra. Vladimir has now adopted Ireland as his home, and he has wowed audiences here from the pedestrians of Grafton Street to President Mary McAleese and guests at Arás an Uachtaráin.

Currently the star of the sell-out Mario Lanza tribute shows at the National Concert Hall, Vladimir and his fellow Slovak musicians will bring their solo show 'Classical Twist' to the National Concert Hall on Wednesday night.

He brought some of his musicians in this morning to entertain us and they started us off with some Mozart and The Turkish March.