The late President Kennedy is remembered fondly, in Ireland, as the first Irish-American President of the United States – although he wasn’t quite the first: there were quite a few Irish-American presidents before him, but they were from Ulster-Irish (generally Presbyterian) stock and that, somehow, discounted them. But JFK was the first Irish Catholic American…

"What were you expecting, lady?” asked the gun-toting Israeli soldier of the late Maeve Binchy. “A Renaissance table set for 13?” Maeve was visiting the bare church at the site of the Last Supper in Jerusalem and was stunned to find that it didn’t resemble what she had imagined. Her belief in the “special Irish…

Many of us, I suspect, know about the work of the renowned anthropologist, Rene Girard and the dissemination of his insights through the work of his student, Gil Bailie. With gratitude to them, I pass along one of their insights, an invaluable look at how we try to handle resentment in our lives. When astronauts…

The Irish Times carried an extraordinary story recently of a woman who got pregnant on her lunchtime break, using anonymously donated sperm from the Danish firm, Cryos.  What gave the story an added twist is that the woman is adopted, and had spent her whole life wondering “what it was like to look like somebody”.…

Globalisation is not something that is done to us, it reflects our choices, writes John Bruton

I rang the hairdresser to say I had to be 10 minutes late for the hairdo: my husband is disabled, I explained, and I had to pick up some medications for him which delayed me. That was fine, and as the young woman was cutting my hair she asked chattily: “So, how long has your…

Mark Twain, the famed American author once said “Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, unless you can’t think of anything better”. The thought struck me when I read a report in the Irish edition of The Sunday Times at the weekend with the headline ‘Trinity woman tipped as cardinal’.…