There’s nothing more terrifying than fire. And Australia is being burnt to a crisp. Across the continent, particularly in the coastal region on the eastern seaboard between Sydney and Melbourne, the scenes are apocalyptic. In the air, gigantic plumes of smoke drift thousands of kilometres across the Tasman Sea, covering glaciers in New Zealand with […]
On 27 November 1920 Galway brothers Patrick and Harry Loughnane were arrested on their family farm by the Royal Irish Constabulary’s Auxiliary Division. The men were locally prominent republicans and the RIC was determined to exact revenge on them for an earlier IRA ambush. A few days after their arrest, the Loughnane brothers’ bodies were […]
President Jair Bolsonaro has vetoed the adherence of Brazil to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, a wide-ranging social, economic and political program that some fear would lead to a global government.
Former President Mary McAleese seems to rather enjoy courting controversy these days, as demonstrated in her recent deliberate attempts to slur Pope John Paul II by taking a quote out of context from his book Love and Responsibility and failing to give the full details regarding its meaning. Indeed, one can only wonder why McAleese […]
A prominent academic and media commentator has accused a Galway hotel of racism after she was served the wrong drink. This week saw Dr Ebun Joseph, who is the module coordinator for the first Black Studies focused module in Ireland, take to Twitter to let the public know that she had been a victim of […]
A consequence of the way society has changed over the course of most of our lifetimes is that fewer and fewer of us live close to our parents. The increase in university education, and careers that take us away to Dublin, or London, or further afield has meant, amongst other things, a collapse in the […]
2010 – 2020 had its fair share of very good attempts at pulling the wool over people’s eyes, with the new phrase “fake news” being coined to cover the age old habit of spreading porkie pies.
The father of teenage climate campaigner Greta Thunberg says he and his wife ‘stopped flying and went vegan to “save” their daughter rather than help the planet’, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that they were not ‘“not climate activists” but had made radical changes to their lifestyles after seeing the positive impact it had […]
In Colombia’s ‘invisible war’ – a ‘bloody conflict’ of over 50 years – nearly 17,000 child soldiers were conscripted by communist terrorist group FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) to fight against the Colombian government, but within their ranks were girls and boys forced to become ‘sex slaves’; repeatedly raped, for the girls there was […]
Yesterday, New Years Day, saw a small group of pro-life protestors conducting some form of silent vigil/protest outside the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, an action that provoked anger from consultant obstetrician Dr. Mary Higgins: Right here (national maternity hospital), right now 1/1/20; wonder why we need exclusion zones @LeoVaradkar @SimonHarrisTD – beneath the windows […]
Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at Kent University, issues a timely warning about the increasing censorship of free speech in the public sphere, as well as self-censorship, ‘which is in many ways more insidious than the formal policing of language’; this is a growing problem on the internet, but also on university campuses, where […]
The food served in Limerick last week, which was labeled by some as “slop”, would be considered a rare treat in much of the world, not least because we have the luxury of cutlery and meat.