The HSE has started using the Pairc Ui Chaoimh stadium in Cork as a Covid-19 testing centre with up to 1,000 people to be processed each day.

The return of Genesis, a feast of French film, and Beckett at the Everyman: arts/ents editor Des O'Driscoll has the lowdown

Concern says 13m are struggling due to the plague of locusts affecting Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, but our focus is on the perceived threat from coronavirus, writes Gerard Howlin

Festival season approaches, legends come to the Opera House, and a young Irish phenomenon continues to impact on UK telly, writes Arts Editor Des O'Driscoll.

It's time for the dreaded New Year’s Resolutions. And this year it’s a bonus round of New Decade Resolutions.

Alan O’Riordan looks back at his highlights of the year.

It seems an unlikely crossover to link iconic Irish writer Samuel Beckett with the business practices of 2019, but commerce has often taken inspiration from unusual sources.

A naval service ship has received a huge honour from Boston after its mayor declared that from now on the US city will mark every October 6 as LÉ Samuel Beckett Day.

I’m showing my age, but does anybody remember Chubby Checker? Ah, you do. No, not the Welsh prop forward from the 1970s.

While pay and conditions will dominate PDForra’s annual conference, so too will overburdening stress within the ranks of the Defence Forces caused by manpower shortages.

The theatre of Dead Centre has always been haunted: by the ghosts of Chekhov, Proust, Shakespeare, even, in Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son. So perhaps it’s a logical step that they have now given us a play performed by ghosts, or at least invisible actors.

A major sale of Irish and international art will take place in the RDS on Monday, writes Des O’Sullivan

Currently in Cork for a Beckett play, actor Stephen Dillane tells Des O’Driscoll about some of his cultural reference points through the decades.

The Cork couple behind Gare St Lazare are back with a second instalment of their widely-praised take on the strange and wonderful ‘How It Is’, writes Marjorie Brennan.

Sell-out nights for Druid Theatre’s productions of John B Keane’s Sive and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot helped its box office income to climb by 38%, to €1.3m last year.

Judy Hegarty Lovett is from Monkstown in Co Cork, and is co-artistic director of theatre company Gare St Lazare Ireland.

Jason Deans’ exhibition in Cobh touches on Brexit and emigration, writes Colette Sheridan.

Summer hurling’s opening weekend threw up killer lines.

The creators of the critically acclaimed television series Game of Thrones, David Benioff and Daniel .B. Weiss, met each other while studying in Dublin.

The opening of the new Kevin Street Garda Station is a timely boost for the force, writes Security Correspondent Cormac O’Keeffe

The Queen of Crime, the champion of Other Voices, and the driving force behind Cork’s Penny Dinners were just some of the leading lights honoured by UCC yesterday.

It’s funny to consider how much talk there is about hands in Irish sport once you concentrate on it, writes Michael Moynihan

Judy Hegarty Lovett of Gare St Lazare tells Marjorie Brennan about the Corkonian company’s journey into the musical mind of Samuel Beckett.

ON a cold January evening in Paris in 1938, Samuel Beckett was walking home with some friends after a night on the town when he was accosted and suddenly stabbed by a pimp called Prudent.

My gambling career, while undeniably short-lived, was pretty momentous.

Ahead of Gare St Lazare Ireland’s world premiere performance of Samuel Beckett’s How It Is in Cork, director Judy Hegarty Lovett addresses the audience, stressing that the Irish writer's original text was a novel, not a play, writes Marjorie Brennan.

Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has reiterated the government’s determination to protect the Common Travel Area and "protect the free movement of people and the mutually beneficial flow of students, staff and researchers."

Censorship in Ireland, which was largely overturned 50 years ago, meant the public couldn’t easily get their eyes on work by our best writers, making it a badge of honour, says Donal Ó Drisceoil.

The LÉ Samuel Beckett dropped anchor in Bantry Bay yesterday to play an integral part in the West Cork Literary Festival.

GIG WISE: Coldplay is the biggie this weekend as Chris Martin and co perform at Croke Park tomorrow.

Eithne has always wanted to achieve things young. She was first published aged 11, receiving £20 for a poem. At 21, she joined The Sunday Times, but took a break after a year to live in Paris and write.

Shane Nestor pitches his Act Up company at people who want to act, but don’t necessarily want to be famous

We bring you a round-up of all the latest news and reviews from the world of entertainment. 

Stuck for cultural events this week? Des O’Driscoll has great suggestions for you, whether it’s tv or theatre you’re in the mood for.

It’s the end of an era for Irish theatre as Michael Colgan bows out at the Gate. He tells Alan O’Riordan about an eventful 33 years

IN his 1938 work Murphy, Samuel Beckett assured us that “the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”.