The issue in this election is whether there will be a change of government. The bigger issue is whether two larger parties sharing 50% of the vote can continually configure government around themselves.

It’s 70 years since the death of prophet of doom / visionary genius (delete according to taste) George Orwell. As supposedly grown-up countries bow down to and elect right-wing authoritarians, you imagine Orwell not so much turning in his grave as on an advanced spin cycle.

The closing of one year and the opening of another might be a time to reflect on why the state of vernacular as spoken and written in this country has gone bananas.

The woman came here from Georgia 11 years ago on a false EU passport.

George Orwell’s classic novel foretold a lot, but the manner in which we’ve handed over our personal data to faceless corporatocracies is doubleplus-ungood, says Suzanne Harrington.

Seán Ó Ríordáin's diaries give an insight into the poet's isolation and illness, as well as politics, literature, and the social stigma of living with TB, writes Pet O'Connell.

Terry Prone It happens. It shouldn’t happen, but it does happen. It happens on a Friday evening. It’s the end of the week, a chance to unwind, get out a couple of bottles of wine.

How apt it is that a statue outside the London headquarters of the BBC is of George Orwell, since it’s possible that his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language has not been read by those in the corporation’s upper echelons whose job it is to advise reporters on the words they should if, at all possible, avoid using.

Let us join forces to block Assange’s extradition from any European country to the US, so that he can travel to Stockholm and give his accusers an opportunity to be heard, writes Yanis Varoufakis

They came to disrobe the emperor. They wanted to see the whites of his eyes, how he would manage under their steely gaze.

Microsoft has announced that it will close the books category of its digital store, writes Rebecca Mardon.

I live on the south coast of England, by the white cliffs. That’s roughly halfway between London and the French coast, were I a seagull.

Former UCC lecturer Derry Cotter has written Leeside Story, a tale of love in Cork city, says Colette Sheridan.

It was George Orwell who warned what he believed to be our decaying civilisation about the consequences of debased language, noting that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”.

Those bubbles might once have been sound bites, now they are the foam formed by a minister gulping for air, writes Gerard Howlin

The pedestrian and the cyclist should be the prioritised road user in cities and towns, writes Victoria White

The death of Winnie Mandela, the anti-apartheid activist and ex-wife of revolutionary Nelson Mandela, does not seem to be causing much grief for her previous supporters (having listened to a Dunnes Stores worker, who had taken part in the South Africa produce boycott of 1984, on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland).

A REPORT slipped out into the ether of a holiday weekend, last Friday, without fanfare, but whose impact in the long-term will be second only to Brexit, writes Gerard Howlin.

The depth of rage that swept over me this week after gardaí apologised to the woman at the centre of the Kerry Babies tribunal, one of the most shameful episodes in recent Irish legal history, can’t be adequately described, writes Clodagh Finn.

There is something of George Orwell’s Animal Farm about the arts — “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.

A video game adaption of George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm has been announced.

How is it possible that this novel was written in 1985, and yet so little has changed in 15 years, asks Louise O’Neill.

IT is now nearly 70 years since George Orwell’s fabulously dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published and in that time it has become one of the most influential books ever written. 

Donald Trump has called journalists the ‘enemy’, and his autocratic tendencies should be a call to arms for writers, painters, and filmmakers, says Nina L Khrushcheva.

Trump’s election has continued a trend in the US of dumbing down political life that has pushed the country down a perilous path, writes Nina Khrushcheva.

Little Logan Whelan Kelly wondered what all the fuss was about when his mum took him to Jack and Jill’s Hares on the March art fundraiser in Dublin.

You might expect hefty Russian tome War And Peace to be the book that people are most likely to have lied about reading. 

BEFORE the holidays every magazine, newspaper, food programme and TV ad was shamelessly luring us into temptation, encouraging us to overspend and overindulge in a myriad of different ways. 

The Beginners Guide to Bondage, Domination and Sado Masochism is currently on sale in Irish book stores across the country and probably across the world.

The Irish do not need Frankfurt to stop us borrowing madly again.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has been urged to open a commission of investigation into the Siteserv sale scandal after it was claimed he and his Government “covered up” the issue for three years.

 Joanna Blythman has taken a look at what we eat and how the food industry is often so misleading. Her conclusions killed Richard Fitzpatrick’s appetite    

SEÁN MONCRIEFF has presented the afternoon show on Newstalk for over 10 years.

When Maryam Namazie, a world renowned Iranian human rights activist cancelled her proposed lecture on “Apostasy and the rise of Islamism”, to the Society for International Affairs (SoFIA) in Trinity College Dublin, on Monday, March 23, she explained that Trinity security officials decided her address was “one sided” and antagonistic to “Muslim students”. 

I am writing in relation to the ongoing dissatisfaction the people of Ireland have shown in recent weeks towards our so-called government.

The Bible, Charles Darwin’s The Origin Of Species and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time have been named as the books which have had the greatest impact on the modern world.

EYES ON THE PRIZE