I spoke to Ian Bailey last week ahead of the launch of his poetry collection at Electric Picnic. I've thought a lot about Ian Bailey over the past couple of years - his various legal cases hit the news regularly - and I've wondered, as I'm sure everyone has, what the hell the truth is. We'll [...]
Over the past few months, we've had a number of calls from locals in the Lagan Grove area of Mayfield about problems in the estate, which is owned and run by Cork City Council. So far, two houses have been vacated due to ongoing anti-social behaviour by a small group - some say this [...]
Picture the scene. A girls' boarding school, circa 1996. A large number of tweens from the local primary school in costume, pacing the floor as they rehearse their speech and drama for the big exam. A locker open. A tantalising glimpse of a bag of mini Toffee Crisps, spilling over. SONY DSC Speech and [...]
You never know when you've got a national scandal on your hands until it's blown up completely. Someone should have warned Alan Shatter about this about a year ago, round about the time he stood up in the Dáil and repeated an allegation about Deputy Mick Wallace that he'd heard from the Garda Commissioner as if [...]
It was a grey June day in 1996 and I was at the Munster semi-final in Limerick’s Gaelic Grounds, watching Limerick beat Clare in a match I can still remember vividly. Vividly, because growing up in Limerick with one parent from Clare, there were only so many matches we went to with opposing flags hanging out [...]
Reading about the Nyberg report into the banking collapse, I was struck by one of its main findings; that a lack of critical debate about the boom in Irish society led to a herd mentality. Teachers, particularly at third-level, have been clamouring for years at the way our education system encourages lemming-like behaviour. The [...]