It's 20 years since she started acting, and more than ten since the start of Father Ted. But with lead roles in a new Shakespeare production, a film in the Dublin film festival and a comedy series by Jennifer Saunders, there's no taming Pauline McLynn.

Darina Allen's recipe for perfect and quick pancakes

Enda Kenny being stingy with the crabs on The Restaurant; bizarre behaviour both upstairs and downstairs in Hotel Babylon and surreal Japanese anime on The South Bank Show are all on the menu for
Dermot Bolger this week

Mark Francis' participation in the much-debated Saatchi Sensation exhibition means that he will forever be associated with a new generation of 'shocking' young British artists, but his new show at Dublin's Kerlin Gallery shows that there is much more to this Newtownards-born artist.

When you spend your weeks reading new novels it gets hard to even look at books that are dog-eared or even thumbed once. Book Notes made an exception this week as news of Avian Flu in Nigeria and dying swans in Europe made the world feel a little bit smaller and deadly disease just a little closer.

Poet Nick Laird's first novel is a comic tale of an Ulsterman's escapades in a sharply-observed London,

Steve Heighton has drawn on the Polaris Expedition to create a novel of big ideas and beautiful language,

Jay McInerney's latest offering fails to fully utilise the horrors of 9/11 to inject some much needed bite into the novel's real subject.

First published in 1968 Ted Hughes's The Iron Man is now back in the shops with wonderfully dark and sinister illustrations by Tom Gauld that will rouse many young people to read the tale that inspired them. And what a tale it is!

Sinn Féin moved decisively at its ard-fheis last weekend to intensify the party's appeal in the South, as a means of breaking the logjam on political development in the North brought about by the DUP's refusal to engage.