I can’t stand my boyfriend’s best friend. For the life of me, I can’t understand why they are friends as they have nothing in common. I love my boyfriend and we are talking about getting married, so his friend could be permanently in my life. What can I do? One challenging element of all relationships…
A group of 35 young adults. Three are given tickets to sit at a table where there are cans of lemonade and chocolate muffins. Five are given tickets to a table where there is orange squash and digestive biscuits. The other 29 get no tickets and are left at tables with dry crackers and a…
Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind are celebrating 40 years of helping the blind, vision impaired and families of children with autism, writes Mags Gargan Imagine a boy who never plays. A boy who never talks. Who never laughs. Who has no friends. A boy who never hugs anyone, or shows any expression of love.…
Mags Gargan speaks to the Director of the Palestrina Choir “He who sings prays twice,” is the often quoted line from St Augustine, and this would be the experience of Blanaid Murphy, after nearly 15 years at the helm of the Palestrina Choir. “Sacred music gives you a glimpse of something beyond yourself, a window…
When St Patrick’s Day is past, you will be getting ready for Mother’s Day next weekend (March 25). While you are making your card and planning a breakfast in bed menu, brainstorm some original ways for presenting a bunch of flowers to your mum. You can cut stems short and fashion a brooch out of…
Decline in vision is common from our midlife onwards and may prompt us to go and get our eyes checked out. Overall, it is estimated that 70% of sight loss in older adults is due to cataracts and refractive errors can that be corrected relatively easily. Indeed, the first sign of visual change can occur…
This morning, our toddler woke me at 3am. While she drifted off again at about 6am, I’ve been awake ever since. Yesterday, I had a relative lie-in as she only woke me at 5am. That’s two nights in a row of around four hours sleep. At two-and-a-half years of age, most toddlers have started sleeping…
Darragh McGann Like any audience, a priest has to know his congregation when delivering a homily, writes Darragh McGann For as long as I can remember I have heard people saying that Mass is boring, as an explanation or an excuse for not attending. I was an altar server for eight years and would often…
It’s not until something goes wrong or breaks that we realise how much we miss it. This week everything in our house seemed to be giving up the ghost: the heating packed in with a worst case scenario of some sort of expansion tank having burst; we failed our NCT and, disaster of all disasters…
Mags Gargan speaks to the Diocesan Pastoral Coordinator in Ossory If anyone is qualified to take the pulse of the Church on the ground in Ireland, it would be someone in Gemma Mulligan’s position. As Diocesan Pastoral Coordinator, the core part of her job is to visit parishes in the Diocese of Ossory on a…
Wendy Grace
Bairbre Cahill
Mags Gargan
Erin Fox
Dr Kevin McCarroll
Maria Byrne