Sometimes the best way to understand reality is to indulge in fantasy. So, try to imagine what the Irish and British governments — and Stormont if it can stir itself — might do if Sinn Féin were to organise an unofficial vote on Irish unity in the North. 

Spike Island’s former inmates may not remember the island facility in a celebratory way but Irish tourism interests will surely celebrate the fact that the island was named, in St Petersburg on Saturday night, as Europe’s leading tourist attraction at the prestigious World Travel Awards 2017.

It’s two years since the car makers’ rigging of diesel emissions figures was exposed. 

Irrespective of its current travails, Ryanair remains one of the greatest Irish success stories in the world of business. 

During his third State of the Union address to the European Parliament earlier this month, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker sketched his vision of how Europe might evolve. 

It may be a forlorn hope, but it is nonetheless important to advocate that the debate on the Eighth Amendment be at least civilised and that campaigners treat each other with the respect and dignity they would demand from their opponents.

ADAPTABILITY, ambition, determination, pragmatism, courage and an understanding of the power of community — and the game-changing gift of a thumb — are some of the

IT is an irony of our time that just as food has assumed five-star celebrity status in the world of entertainment, far too many people view the prospect of turning a slipper of bacon, and a head of Savoy cabbage, into a dinner much as the Spartans viewed the Persian armies advancing on the Pass of Thermopylae in 480BC.

UNLESS you lived in a society where the monochrome television station began broadcasting at six o’clock and closed at 10.30; where the idea of an active and pleasurable sex life outside of marriage was as remote as grand opera or real coffee, it is hard to imagine how very exotic Hugh Hefner, who died yesterday, aged 91, seemed.

Ireland’s suicide rate has stabilised and has begun to fall since the recession, according to the HSE’s National Office for Suicide Prevention (NOSP) 2016 report.