It was the year of the metamorphis in Northern Ireland. On 8 May Ian Paisley of loyalist extremism and Martin McGuinness of republican paramilitarism took office together as First Minister and Deputy First Minister in the new power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland. t was the year that Bertie Ahern triumphed at the polls for a third successive time, while his own political destiny was challenged by the Planning Tribunal.....
Judges claimed €1.9m in expenses in 2005 and the highest amount claimed by a single judge was €54,902. Over €63,000 was claimed for judicial attire and incidental expenses.
The chairman of the Morris tribunal is heading towards a fullscale clash with the main victims of the Garda corruption in Donegal that his inquiry was set up to investigate.
The tussle between the Tánaiste and the Minister for Finance over the former's proposed abolition of stamp duty is only the opening skirmish in what promises to be a long war between the two. By Justine McCarthy
A new online exhibition shows previously unpublished images of Dublin city centre, destroyed after the Easter Rising
Ireland has had its own 9/11 in which more people were massacred than were killed in the United States on 9 September 2001. Fewer than 3,000 were killed in the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks five years ago – more than 3,650 were killed in the Irish 9/11.
In November 2004, Socialist Party councillor Mick Murphy visited a construction site at Balgaddy to talk to three carpenters who were staging an industrial protest on top of a 200-foot tower crane. As well as their own protest, one of the men, Daniel O'Connell Jnr, told of a "concentration camp" regime at the site involving Turkish employees, with wages of just ?2.50 an hour. Mick Barry investigated further and got help from an English-speaking Turkish man living in Carlow, Baki Uzunkaya.
Could this be Ireland in 2030? One of Ireland's leading young architecture firms, FKL (Fagan, Kelly and Lysaght), thinks so. FKL is curating the Irish entry in the Venice Architecture Biennale and has brought together a group of young Irish architects to predict how Irish cities, suburbs and the countryside might look in 30 years. Amongst the ideas they've come up with are floating cities, seaside holiday villages that are only visible when occupied and, most radically perhaps, a decent national railway infrastructure that would halve commuting times across the country.
There were over 50,000 candidates for the Leaving Certificate in 2006. More than 60 per cent of them took higher-level English. About a quarter took higher-level French but only a small proportion took any other language – the next highest being German with 9 per cent taking it at higher-level.