HUGH MAXTON’s Happen is a ‘memoir-novel’ about the coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s of Godwin Happen, an enigmatic young man with a taste for literature and politics from a Protestant family in Dublin. 

IT STRUCK a sensitive nerve when the poet WJ Mc Cormack, aka Hugh Maxton, this week defended Aosdána’s annual funding of €2.7 million by mentioning that Fair City cost €11 million. This fact was met, according to an RTÉ report, with laughter from the floor of Aosdána’s general assembly meeting at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.

An elite artists’ group has rejected public criticism over the amount of funding it receives from the taxpayer, claiming the Government would drive “JCBs full of money” to any private business that provided such a return on the “investment”.

A university professor who attended the Bloody Sunday march said today he knew army claims that the IRA started the gun battles ‘‘this time at least would be a lie’’.