Mario Draghi this week faces one of the dominant challenges for the euro-area economy in 2015, writes Catherine Bosley

AUSTERITY, unemployment, and the recession have affected some groups in our society more than others.

16-year-old Ellie Menton describes the bittersweet loss of her beloved grandmother earlier this month

There’s no easy way around this readers: a great Christmas present won’t be bought in the mad dash run-up to Christmas.

I SPENT a month in Sierra Leone, at the front line of the largest Ebola outbreak in history.

EARLIER this week the all-powerful, life-giving or life-denying European Central Bank published the results of its stress tests on 130 of Europe’s banks. Only 25 failed and just one — and what a welcome “just” that is — is Irish.

ONE fabulously hot morning last month, a man stood on the roof of a building in Dublin City centre, indicating, by his actions if not words, that he planned to throw himself off.

AS the drama of the CAO third-level places unfolded this week, I thought about what Burmese pro-democracy advocate, Aung San Suu Kyi, said in Strasbourg last year when accepting a prize for promoting freedom of thought: "I’ve always said there’s no hope without endeavour. Hope has no meaning unless we are prepared to work to realise our hopes and dreams, but in order to do that we need friends."

VOTERS face between three and six referenda in the first half of 2015. They will be asked to decide on lowering the voting age to 16, lowering the age threshold for candidates for the presidency from 35, and to decide on marriage equality.

THE protests about drug-dealers in Roscrea gave me a profound sense of déjà vu.