Spare a thought for the people of Denmark, who are posting their last Christmas cards, in this year of 2025. For, after a catastrophic fall in the sending of letters and cards via the postman, Denmark is bringing an end to its traditional postal service on December 30. No more letters in the land of…

Every Christmas I am struck again by how unstructured the first Christmas really was. Our Nativity scenes are tidy and serene, but the reality was far more fragile. There was no priest, no sanctuary, no official ritual. God entered the world without the religious structures we normally consider essential. The beginnings of salvation were entrusted…

Do They Know It’s Christmas has a fond place in my heart. I was a new graduate in 1984, and Bob Geldof’s righteous anger was intoxicating. Buying the single and watching Geldof brute force it into the charts felt inspiring. Band Aid, and its charity single, was, of course, followed by Live Aid in July…

At the invitation of the Abbess and Benedictine community, some twenty Presentation Sisters from different parts of Ireland were hosted for a very special weekend in Kylemore Abbey in Connemara from November 13 to 16, 2025. This retreat was a gift from the Benedictine community as an expression of gratitude for the immense contribution of…

An invitation to a pre-Christmas musical arrived through the letterbox and I hesitated. It was for a student production of The Sound of Music. The film was first adapted for the screen sixty years ago, and I already knew every song, every line, every part, as if I had been rehearsing for a thousand years.…

It strikes me sometimes that a lot of people are incapable of holding two or more competing ideas in their head at the same time. Or that many are unwilling to do so. I had an exchange recently with RTÉ Director General, Kevin Bakhurst, at an Oireachtas Committee, over RTÉ’s decision to boycott the Eurovision…

It was ill-judged of the Department of Housing to produce a video tutoring young people how to behave if they have to move back into the parental home. And rightly, it had to be withdrawn when it produced a stream of negative feedback – including rebounding on the young people who were featured on the…

It is hardly a contested statement to suggest that Donald Trump is not a universally-loved President of the United States. Polls carried out in Continental Europe show him to have very low likeability ratings: 77% of the French have an unfavourable view: 79% of the Germans, ditto. In Spain, his unfavourability rate rises to 80%…

Before settling in Ireland, Bro. Esteban Beltran grew up in Guadalajara in a Mexican family which did not practice its Catholic faith. “We used to go to church for funerals and weddings and baptisms,” he said. “We never went every Sunday or for Christmas or for Easter.” He grew into a depressed teenager who did…