ireland

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year, is the best book I’ve read in years. I can’t remember the last time I binge read anything. I think I had even forgotten that there was such a thing as staying up late guzzling down a whole novel — and this one is at 600-plus pages — several nights in a row. I did not stream whatever show everybody was watching; I did not reach out for Instagram. I read — at first, relating hard; then, disappearing into the characters’ secret lives; all…

Social media giant X, formerly known as Twitter, has defended its response to recent rioting in Dublin that was in part fuelled by far-right users of the platform. X described as "inaccurate" claims by Ireland's justice minister Helen McEntee that it did not engage with Irish police during the November 23 unrest.The violence, which saw police cars and public transport vehicles set on fire and shops looted, was the worst seen in Dublin for decades. In a statement to the Irish parliament last week McEntee said that while…

Credit: Los Muertos Crew from Pexels Hygiene poverty is a pervasive and hidden problem in Ireland and cuts across all income levels, according to the first comprehensive study of the issue in Ireland. The study, conducted by the School of Social Work and Social Policy in Trinity College Dublin, was commissioned by the charity…

‘The universal trickster has been at work on my life in all sorts of wild ways,” Irish novelist Paul Lynch tells me the morning after he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song, which imagines Ireland taken over by a fascist regime. It has been a dramatic few years since he started writing the novel in 2018: his son had just been born; he had long Covid, which made writing an impossibility some days; he has had cancer and separated from his wife. And now he has landed the biggest prize in contemporary…

YouTube recently confirmed that it was expanding the crack down on ad blockers globally. Soon, it was reported that people started to use more sophisticated ad blockers suggesting that Google’s plan may have backfired. The Google-owned company may now have a bigger problem to deal with as it is facing a criminal complaint for spying. Meanwhile, Meta is also facing a similar complaint for data collection without consent.According to a report by The Register, privacy consultant Alexander Hanff has challenged both YouTube…

The memories have come tumbling out. The little girl who played in a Dublin park. The teenager who sat on school steps strumming a guitar. The pop star who leaned out of a record company’s limousine in Washington DC to shout joyous insults at the Pentagon.Ireland is remembering Sinéad O’Connor – and grasping what it has lost. For some people in Glenageary and Dún Laoghaire – the south Dublin suburbs where the singer grew up – the news of her death still had an air of unreality on Thursday.For almost four decades O’Connor…

Tata Consultancy Services played a crucial role in assisting AIB life, a joint venture between Allied Irish Banks plc and Great-West Lifeco, in launching its operations in Ireland. AIB life's vision is to guide individuals towards financial security, and TCS provided a future-ready, digitally enabled platform to support this mission.Chosen as the strategic partner, TCS collaborated in building a digital-first, comprehensive life company catering to the Irish market. This platform enables AIB's 3.2 million customers to…

Journalists who covered Northern Ireland during the Troubles used to tell a story, possibly apocryphal, about gaggles of children that would trail after camera crews filming on the Falls Road. “Hey, mister,” they would shout out, “do you fancy a soundbite?”The anecdote was a wry admission that the conflict had reached media saturation and that local people had become all too media savvy. Some riots had a staged, theatrical quality. Coverage of the Troubles became a blur of burning cars, shootings and funerals. For…

Britain experiences hundreds of earthquakes each year. Credit: Raffaele Bonadio, Author provided The village of Tean in Staffordshire, England, was hit by a 3.3-magnitude earthquake on June 28 2023. The tremors caused windows and doors to rattle in the surrounding area. Earthquakes of this nature are not uncommon in Britain (the…

In Irish writer Kathleen MacMahon’s fourth novel, Cassie and Christo, two half-siblings, who live on opposite sides of the globe, have centred their lives on their jobs in an effort to forget their traumatic past. They are attracted back to Galway, Ireland, to reminisce about a wonderful childhood summer, the final one before their mother died, when a big storm there makes the news. However, as they go, they come upon memories of a summer that was considerably less joyful and had ended in tragedy. They are then forced…