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Diarmaid FerriterThe Irish Times |
In January 2020, Joe Biden, then seeking the Democratic nomination for the US presidency, dismissed a request from BBC correspondent Nick Bryant in...
In June 1954, TK Whitaker, then assistant secretary at the Department of Finance, wrote a note to outgoing Minister for Finance Seán MacEntee: “I...
Timothy Smiddy, an economist from Cork who advised the Sinn Féin delegation that negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, found himself at the...
Visitors and writers captivated by the Irish coast have often commented on the coexistence of beauty and tragedy. It was both the harshness and...
Visitors and writers captivated by the Irish coast have often commented on the coexistence of beauty and tragedy. It was both the harshness and...
In 2014 Donald Trump was welcomed to Ireland with a red carpet at Shannon Airport. What had the charlatan, blowhard clown done to merit such a...
A meeting in the Mansion House in Dublin 100 years ago this month under the auspices of the Dublin Christian Citizens’ Council sought to highlight...
More than a quarter of a century ago, the headline from a Financial Times article on the development of mobile technology suggested that the “New...
Nell McCafferty was part of a remarkable generation of women journalists who felt compelled to upend expectations. The changing political environment,...
This summer marks the centenary of the announcement by minister for education Eoin MacNeill that the teaching of Irish would be made compulsory in all...
Oh, how we laughed in the summer of 1992. The T-shirt vendors made hay while the Bishop Eamonn Casey revelations shone. “Wear a condom just in...
It is 70 years since Kerry writer Bryan MacMahon found himself the target of considerable hostility in his own locality. His sin was to contribute to...
As Britain woke up to a new political dawn last week, optimism was expressed that a prolonged, sour era of Anglo-Irish relations is over. It would be...
American scholars and journalists have long debated their country’s national identity. Twenty years ago, the Harvard political scientist Samuel P....
Studying ecology was the preserve of a privileged few in Ireland in 1979. Eamon Ryan was one of them, as was Ciarán Cuffe, both then students at the...
The length of some of our ballot papers on polling day last week generated considerable comment. Twenty-eight inches is certainly notable, as was the...
During the second World War, British prime minister Winston Churchill found opportunity in the House of Commons to refer to the “large numbers of...
In this newspaper’s property supplement 25 years ago this month a feature article warned of the prospect of a “dream home” turning into a...
On Wednesday, when announcing Ireland’s formal recognition of the state of Palestine, Taoiseach Simon Harris made much of the Message to the Free...
Twenty-five years ago this month, Mary Raftery stopped us hurtling smugly towards the close of the 20th century. The economy was booming, the...
There will be commemorations this month of the devastating impact and legacy of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings 50 years ago that killed 33 civilians...
We hardly need further reminders of how little the British Tories think of Ireland, but unfortunately we have more, courtesy of former prime minister...
As a book reviewer, Hilary Mantel was captivated by John McGahern’s final novel That They May Face the Rising Sun, published in 2002: “This is a...
Tá Éire ag Forbairt (Ireland is Building) was the confident title of a gleaming brochure issued by the first coalition government in 1949. It sought...
In dealing with the stubbornness of Northern Ireland prime minister James Craig in November 1921, UK prime minister David Lloyd George sought to...
Did those who have masterminded the Israeli assault on Gaza ever sit down and decide what number of deaths would be acceptable? 10,000? 20,000? 33,000...
In his book Ruling the Void (2013) the late Irish political scientist Peter Mair suggested “the age of party democracy has passed”, with political...
Speaking as taoiseach in June 2018 at the annual commemoration of one his predecessors. John A Costello, Leo Varadkar looked back and forward....
“Sacred heart o’ Jesus take away our hearts o’ stone, and give us hearts o’ flesh.” These were the words uttered by Juno after the death of...
Right from the start, politicians were tetchy about Irish public service broadcasting and uncertain of their role in relation to it. One hundred years...
Speaking in the Dáil in October 1922, Minister for Home Affairs Kevin O’Higgins commented on what was one of the interesting features of the...
In June 1953, over 25,000 people attended the blessing and opening of the new GAA ground in west Belfast, Roger Casement Park. The stadium was...
It is now 35 years since Roger Garland was elected the first Green Party TD. It was the third time Garland had run in the Dublin South constituency...
Sometimes even experienced civil servants can be sloppy in crafting words. In May 1997, John Holmes, private secretary to Tony Blair, less than a week...
Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald made much reference to history this week. In response to the DUP’s decision to resume its place in the...
Perhaps we haven’t moved as far away from 1937 as we might think. The forthcoming referendums on the constitutional articles relating to women and...
––Like many in Cork and well beyond, I would not like to see Páirc Uí Chaoimh rebranded to meet the requirements of funding from SuperValu. But...
In 2020, Dublin poet Rachael Hegarty, like so many sons and daughters of dementia sufferers, fretted as the Covid pandemic restrictions began to bite:...
As prime minister of Northern Ireland a century ago, James Craig faced a 1924 that required a delicate political balancing act. With the first Labour...
The voluminous journals of the playwright, folklorist and patron of the arts, Lady Augusta Gregory, contain a wealth of detail on her relationship...
I had not expected to find myself back in Dublin’s Pro Cathedral. I sang there from 1982-6 with the Palestrina Choir as a far-from-angelic...
In 1939, Trinity College Dublin established a chair of applied economics for Joseph Johnston. A prolific author, one of Johnston’s best known books...
It seems appropriate that Friday’s funeral cortege of Shane MacGowan will pass through some of the streets of a Dublin fraught, raw and struggling...