Why not a loyalist woman as the symbol of the ‘new Ireland’? Why not Bessie Burgess?
I was in Galway last month to see the brilliant production by the Druid theatre company of Sean O’Casey’s classic play set during the 1916 Rising: The Plough and the Stars. This is the tragic story of Jack Clitheroe, who abandons his young wife Nora to fight with the Irish Citizen Army: he is killed and she goes mad with grief. But it is also a fabulous comedy performed by the inhabitants of a poverty-stricken Dublin tenement, led by a raucous, drunken …