September Advice Clinics Thursday 5th     Mungret Regional FC, Mungret             9:00pm                           Greenhill’s Hotel, Ennis Rd.                   9:45pm Friday 6th          Unicorn Bar, Dooradoyle,      

I closed my pre-Local and European election Sunday Independent column saying that those election results “…may not be a definitive predictor of who will or will not form the government, but they will be the best indicator of it we will see before the general election posters start appearing later this year.” The results vindicated

A few weeks back I dismissed Fine Gael’s leadership change and reset as a “scramble for relevance.” Last week’s Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll would suggest I was being too complimentary. It showed a 2-point drop for Fine Gael, and a 3-point increase for Sinn Féin. Fine Gael’s reset strategy is not working. Nor will it.

If you remember The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin a BBC sitcom from the late 1970s, chances are that you will recall the character, Doc Morrissey. Morrissey was the bumbling company doctor who couldn’t diagnose for love nor money but could recite a patient’s symptoms back to them, saying “I suffer from that too…

Though Coca-Cola, Hallmark and Disney have tried to influence our vision of the ideal Christmas, none of them have had a fraction of the impact of the great Charles Dickens. When it comes to depicting the sights and sounds of this holy and festive season, Dickens has no equal. It is over a century and

Last week the opposition opted to table a Dáil motion that sought to divide the Oireachtas on the human tragedy that is Gaza, rather than unite us. That move was regrettable. There is much that unites deputies on this issue. The President, Taoiseach and Tánaiste have been to the forefront on the global stage in

One of the great political fallacies of the past half century is that the “triple lock” is some great obstacle to the participation of our Defence Forces in international peace and security operations. The triple lock has, as the name suggests, three components: (i) government decision, (ii) Dáil approval and a (iii) UN mandate. These

My recent article published in the Sunday Independent: There is no shortage of political pundits who are happy to regularly disparage the holding of constituency clinics by TDs. But, for every one of them, there are several thousand more members of the public see these weekly T.D. clinics as a vital way to engage face

What happened in Cherry Orchard last Monday night was shocking, but it was not surprising. It was not surprising to those of us who have warned for months that chronic anti-social behaviour is on the rise and going unchecked. It was certainly no surprise to the countless thousands of decent law-abiding people living and working