The O'Brien Press certainly seems intent on cornering the junior fiction market when it comes to the 1916 Rising.

Any weekday morning they step off the buses under the Queensboro Bridge – dozens of prisoners released from the New York prison system. Clouds of white breath leave them for the air. Hard men, most of them. A few women. It is fascinating to watch their first moment of freedom. One might expect to see their lungs swell. A tiny skip in their steps. Or their arms open to a loved one. But they look rigid mostly, like they've forgotten how it is to move in this space.

Darina Allen visits the ancient Indian city of Varanasi, where pilgrims come to bathe and say goodbye to their dead

The Abbey has taken a Greek classic and used it as an allegory for Iraq: the result is incoherent politics and bad drama, writes Colin Murphy

Ivor Callely wants to see 'justice applied in all cases'. Finian McGrath thinks Donna Cleary's murder was 'an absolute crime'. Martin Brady knows families who pay their mortgage out of the children's allowance. Five TDs met the residents of Coolock recently for a public question-and-answer session. From the audience, there was no mention of murders or gun crime. Colin Murphy reports

 Invariably in the wake of outrages such as the murder of Donna Cleary, the voices of amateur sociologists are to be heard even above the grief of those left devastated.

Two new books offer and insight and hope to lead to action so that we don't burn ourselves out of existence. Review by Carl Zimmer

A sporting reputation is a shimmering, delicate thing. It has been a career defining season for Robbie Keane. Back in Se...

Last year's Council of Europe decision to give Irish full language status is being downgraded. By Eoin Ó Murchú

Last week, as every so often, I glimpsed in passing a couple of newspaper headlines about some survey or other telling us that we are becoming increasingly apathetic and ignorant about politics. Two-thirds of us, or something (I couldn't be bothered reading it), don't know the difference between the Oireachtas and the Government; a shocking number think politicians do a good job but haven't a clue what they actually do; nine out of ten voters under 30 don't know the name of the Ceann Comhairle – that sort of thing.