Ten weeks of drought posed a major challenge to Irish golf course. Kevin Markham interviewed two greenkeepers to assess how course conditions have been impacted. Ten weeks of drought posed a major challenge to Irish golf courses.

Irish missionaries are spearheading a bid to plant a million trees as part of the re-greening of one of Africa's most parched regions.

Professor George Shorten will be running the Cork City Marathon for a cause close to his heart.

THE cuckoo’s evocative call announces the arrival of summer but it’s no longer heard where I live, writes Richard Collins. 

An Eritrean man suspected of running a human trafficking network that sent thousands of migrants to Europe, leaving many to die on the way, has been extradited from Sudan to Italy, officials said.

ON JUNE 20, 1631, ‘Barbary’ pirates raided Baltimore, taking 107 men, women, and children into slavery. It was the largest such raid on an Irish or British settlement since Viking times, writes Richard Collins

People often wonder what use are economists. In terms of climate change, this is a particularly appropriate question.

The EU’s dream of building “a ring of friends” from the Caucasus to the Sahara has turned into a nightmare as conflicts beyond its borders send refugees teeming into Europe.

My study window looks out over a 10-acre meadow with a small hill on the far side. Under the grass on the hill there’s esker sand and gravel laid down in the last Ice Age. Back in the days when the main forms of transport round here were powered by horses and donkeys people had to be more locally self-sufficient, particularly for heavy items like sand and gravel, and a small quarry was opened up on the west side of the hill.

I think the port of Calais is 32 miles from Dover. The migrants at Calais are relentlessly testing the boundaries (literally) of the Channel Tunnel and the Port of Calais.

It is a sunny morning on Sicily’s east coast and Mount Etna is a postcard, rising from a green-blue sea up through olive groves, orange orchards and steep hill towns to ascend a towering snowy cone ringed by cotton-wool clouds.

A summer spent eating, swimming, and resting doesn’t sound too taxing but it could just earn two intrepid adventurers a place in the record books.

The bodies of 18 migrants who likely died of dehydration have been found in the Sahara desert in northern Niger, the International Organisation for Migration said.

The bodies of 18 migrants who likely died of dehydration have been found in the Sahara desert in northern Niger, the International Organisation for Migration said.

You mightn’t know Paul Deasy. To give you an idea what we’re dealing with, he’s a guy who regularly gets his wife to drop him off in Dungarvan. Only Paul lives in Fermoy, 32 miles away.

What’s the toughest part of running 350 miles into the Arctic Circle?

This is not another story about how drugs can screw you up. This is a story about how Europe’s appetite for drugs screws up the lives of hundreds of millions of others, writes Alex Perry

THANKS to a verse in a nonsense carol, the turtle dove is a celebrity at this time of year.

Check out our spoiler-free guide to tonight's TV.

Alex Perry on how George Clooney and his celebrity friends helped engineer the birth of a new African country and then saw it implode

IT’S a long while since I came across a cook book where I wanted to cook virtually everything in the book and it didn’t even belong to me.

GAH! Too late! The message on the page reads: THIS PROJECT IS FUNDED! Now I feel left out. I could have been in at the start but now I’m pressing my nose against the glass as the funders and the fundees smile inside.

The interfaces of Islamic and Western culture are many, but when Tinariwen guitarist Abdallah Ag Lamida was abducted by Islamist rebels in Mali in 2012, it was a potential watershed. The plentiful al-Qaida African affiliates seemed to be saying western music is satanic.

The iconic Irish swallow is on the decline due to the widening of the Sahara, soaking Irish summers, and human hunters, according to a leading bird expert.

Record levels of air pollution will continue to plague the UK, experts have warned.

A British adventurer has achieved a world first after becoming the first person to cycle to the South Pole from the edge of the continent in just 10 days.

Presidential campaign hits a snag

ACCORDING to the Woodland Trust, autumn lasted two weeks longer than usual this year and there were lots of berries. This augurs well for wild creatures facing the trials and tribulations of winter.

WHOSE idea was it to hold the 2022 World Cup in a little place the size of Connecticut with temperatures hotter than inside your oven? Whose idea was it to hold the world’s biggest football event, synonymous with lager, lager, lager, in a place that doesn’t do alcohol?

Divers began the recovery of dozens of migrants’ bodies yesterday from a boat that sank last week off the coast of Sicily in one of the worst such disasters to hit people fleeing violence, poverty and oppression in Africa.

SPRING was late this year.

I WAS not surprised to read a genetic study of the present day inhabitants of the Canary Islands, revealed that the natives of La Gomera — our second home for over 30 years — retain more of the aboriginal DNA that the inhabitants of the other islands.

WHEN Mark Thatcher went missing in the Sahara while taking part in an international motor race in Jan 1982, his ashen-faced mother, upset and distressed, appeared on television close to breaking down.

French and Malian troops retook control of Timbuktu, a Unesco World Heritage site, yesterday after Islamist rebel occupiers fled the ancient Sahara trading town and torched several buildings, including a priceless manuscript library.

Algerian forces are scouring the Sahara for the five foreigners missing since the gas plant massacre.

The group claiming to have masterminded the storming of the Algerian gas plant warned of more attacks against any country backing France’s military intervention in neighbouring Mali.

Algeria’s state news service has said de-mining teams are going through the gas refinery that was the scene of a four-day hostage stand-off, searching for explosives left by the Islamic militants who seized dozens of foreigners.

The Algerian government says 32 militants and 23 captives were killed during the three-day military operation to end the hostage crisis at a natural gas plant in the Sahara.

Eleven militants have been killed in a final assault by Algerian special forces on a desert gas facility where workers were being held captive, the state news agency said today.

The bloody three-day hostage standoff at a natural gas plant in the Sahara took a dramatic turn yesterday as Algeria’s state news service reported that nearly 100 of the 132 foreign workers kidnapped by Islamic militants had been freed.

Americans are still being held hostage in Algeria on the third day of a stand-off with militants at a natural gas complex in the Sahara, a US official said.

About 60 foreign hostages are unaccounted for in the stand-off with Islamist militants, Algeria’s state news service says.

Islamist guerrillas are turning the vast Sahara into a new theatre of war against the West, writes Alex Diaz