“Tell me a story about when you were a boy.” That’s the unchanging instruction I have received from my eight-year-old boy at bedtime for weeks now. At first, I thought this was brought on by my father’s colourful stories of his childhood in Ballyvaughan, where fact and fiction intermingle fantastically. One recent story was about…
I believe that viruses are the most powerful non-human creatures on the planet. I’ve never had to take a day off work in order to recover from an attack by a bear, shark, lion or wolf. Only viruses have the power to so casually disrupt our lives. Any large, fang-toothed creature you might think of has…
One eccentric feature of parenthood is that your holiday dates are chosen for you by the Department of Education. Left to their own devices, few parents would spontaneously elect upon the dreary weeks of late October as the ideal season for a family holiday. Yet we must make the most of what we are given,…
Autumn brings a kind of pleasant melancholy. The warmth of summer recedes and the cold nights draw in. The trees, so recently full, lush and green, are now shedding crisp brown leaves for the children to wade through on their way to school, searching for conkers. Bright berries appear in the hedges and scatterings of…
Our seven-year-old has been busy writing computer programmes. He has become fascinated with a piece of software that enables kids to control a digital cat with simple instructions, such as: walk five steps; say “meow”; turn 90 degrees, and so on. It’s good to see him understand so naturally the basic logic that underpins…
The summer holidays are gone too soon. Our freshly scrubbed children, in their brand-new oversized school jumpers, have been packed off back to school, proud to be elevated a year higher in the pecking order. Gone are the languorous days of summer, where time flows easy. The kids are happy to be back to school.…
Staff Reporter Churches in the North were privately offered £100,000 a year by a British government minister if they would work more closely together in the interests of community relations, a declassified file has revealed. A memo from Tony McCusker in the Central Community Relations Unit (CCRU) in January 1991 set out details of a…
Ngala Killian Chimtom Barely three years after the highly contagious Ebola virus struck Sierra Leone, killing roughly 4,000 people with 14,000 confirmed cases, the impoverished West African country is once more in the throes of disaster. Weeks of heavy rain led to the collapse of a side of Sugar Loaf Mountain on August 14, crushing…
Dear Editor, I can’t help noticing that, in Christopher Altieri’s Notebook about the papal sacking of Cardinal Gerhard Müller as Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (IC 10/08/2017), he carefully avoids mentioning the ‘elephant in the room’ – Cardinal Müller’s attitude to the dubia expressed by four cardinals about the Pope’s…
After the Manchester terror attack, our screens had an endless loop of images of panic, followed by heartrending images of parents frantically searching for their children. Some will never see them again. Even though some of the children killed are a similar age to ours, our children have no idea the attack happened. We are…