NATIONALISM allows people to wrap murder in a flag and present it as war in a just cause. And it allows the ideologues of that cause to take history, scrub away the bits that do not fit the new fairytale, and write a version more fitted to their aims.

Winter storms Desmond, Eva, and Frank have wreaked havoc on golf courses throughout Ireland but nowhere more aggressively than at the famed Killarney Golf & Fishing Club in Kerry.

A meeting of the GAA’s powerful Central Council has agreed that rugby and soccer internationals can take place in Croke Park in 2007.