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Justine MccarthyThe Irish Times |
During goodbye drinks for a former colleague some years ago, the departing journalist took me aside to offer friendly career advice. If you want to...
Remember when we emerged en masse from behind our front doors, flung open our windows, and stationed ourselves on our balconies and at our garden...
Some Yes advocates for last month’s referendums on care and the family privately confess they feel so bruised by the personalised abuse they...
Here’s an audience-generating idea for impoverished RTÉ. Now that the curtain has come down on Dancing with the Stars for another year, it’s time...
Signs of starvation are becoming visible now in the faces of Gazans. In the news pictures, we see how their cheek bones protrude sharply under eyes...
The night before the referendums polls opened, a nephew in South Africa sent a screenshot of a television news report that Ireland was about to vote...
For as long as audiences find ventriloquists entertaining, our politicians will never be out of work. Their talent for speaking not only out one side...
Eleanor Roosevelt said women are like tea bags because “we don’t know our true strength until we are in hot water”. There is something else we...
Nothing encapsulated the momentousness of what is afoot on this island as vividly as a road trip two women shared last weekend. It was the day of the...
For anyone who thinks marriage is a sentence, not a word, the French have a solution. It surfaced when a young Franco-Irish couple recently visiting...
Joe Biden has blamed Iran for the killing of three US soldiers in Jordan last Sunday on the entirely logical and credible premise that “they’re...
The last time Ian Bailey rang me he said he had a cracking story about a national personality who, he alleged, had indulged in a sexual orgy. Ring...
In the treasure trove that comprises John Charles McQuaid’s papers lies a note from the then Catholic Archbishop of Dublin to his buddy, Taoiseach...
The heat from the sun was fierce. There was nothing for it but to plunge, once again, into the cooling sea before flopping back down on the beach...
Enoch Burke is still doing time in Mountjoy jail. He has already done more than 200 days and seems likely to set a record for time served for contempt...
Stuck for a new year resolution? Convinced yourself that smoking and jam doughnuts are actually good for you and, sure, you’d only be dicing with...
Snootiness goes against the native grain. Try it, and see how quickly you get pulled back down to what the communal spirit level deems to be your...
A long time ago in Bethlehem, so the holy Bible says, Mary’s boy child, Jesus Christ, was born. Glad tidings reached King Herod of Judea that the...
Dáil Éireann’s linguistic stylebook, entitled the Salient Rulings of the Chair, contains a list of insulting nouns that TDs are not allowed to...
Funerals are sacrosanct junctures for society when the usual human activities of badmouthing and gossiping are temporarily suspended. It’s a custom...
Evening prayers had ended and the sermon had just begun in the al-Maqadmah mosque on the northern outskirts of Jabalia refugee camp when an explosion...
There was a moment during Molly Martens’s sentencing hearing for the voluntary manslaughter of her husband, Jason Corbett, when doubts about her...
There used to be a fad in the 1970s for forecasting the exact day and time the world was due to end, imminently. As a teenager, I sat alone in...
“I write at a moment of great anguish for the world,” Craig Mokhiber began his letter of departure as the director of the United Nation’s human...
His name was Omar Shamallakh. His life on earth lasted two months. In his photograph he is wearing a little-boy-blue babygro. He looks cared for and...
During the slaughter at the Nahal Oz kibbutz last Saturday, terrified residents hiding from Hamas killers pleaded for help on their WhatsApp group....
One Christmas many moons ago, the panto taught us children a lesson about the trickery of an optical illusion. That year, a motorcar was wheeled on to...
Just before the first Covid-19 shutdown in the spring of 2020, Epic, the Irish emigration museum, wheeled an empty plinth into the middle of...
Ireland is a land rich with children’s fairy tales. There once was even a president of the country whose wife, Sinéad Bean de Valera, wrote books...
A pleasurable journey to south Kerry was rudely interrupted by a begrudger last Sunday. The radio had been serving up a banquet of sports coverage...
Well, that lasted all of a nanosecond. One moment, Vera Pauw is a hero, making sports history for Ireland and leading the St Patrick’s Day parade as...