McGahern lit up our darkness

It is extraordinary how sometimes in history tiny moments can, in retrospect, be seen as enormous and defining moments.

Take 1964 in Mississippi when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger and the American Civil Rights movement was born. Or 1968 in Caledon, Co Tyrone, when a squat in a contested local government council house began Ireland’s civil rights movement. Or 1965, when The Dark, a novel ...