Media

Richard McAuley and I were the only male Caucasians in the large 'Holding Room'. The rest of the people, men and women of all ages and a scattering of children, were mostly dark skinned. The majority of them looked like Arabs, or what you would imagine Arabs might look like. Richard and I were taken out of the line at the Passport control. Once our passports are put into the computer it lights up like the Christmas tree at Belfast City Hall. So over the last decade or so, we have come to know Holding Rooms from Los Angeles to San Francisco and all the points of entry in between.

There are times when Irish nationals who are tax non-residents do have to pay tax in Ireland.

A Channel 4 programme attempted to identify the person behind The Falling man photograph, RTÉ documented Irish scientists, and the BBC discovered a Masterchef. Dermot Bolger reviews the week's television

As all viewers of Columbo, Inspector Morse and A Touch of Frost are aware, the "hunch" is a crucial element of police detective work. In the fictional world, the investigator forms a view of what has occurred – how the crime was committed; who had means, motive and opportunity; who the murderer might be – and sets about looking for the evidence to back up this hunch. In television land, these hunches are disproved on only the rarest occasions, and then only in the subtlest fashion.

The best programme on radio, on any radio, is Mooney Goes Wild on One. The idea of doing a nature programme on radio mus...

If, as Samuel Johnson proclaimed, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, in our media it tends to be mainly sportswriting scoundrels who are permitted to seek asylum there. Lately it's been with page-one ostentation.

Appearing on RTE's Late Late Show, hosted by Pat Kenny, on Friday, 17 March, Brendan Gleeson made the following remarks (edited version):

The Irish sacked Britain last week. Ten winners laid waste to Cheltenham and a last minute try created a Triple Crown at...

There's only one reason I continue to brave Washington's dreary formal press dinners, which are so calcified they're a bad cross between a zombie movie and those little Mexican Day of the Dead sculptures.

The fairly fierce tide of anti-Americanism you hear crinkling in the pages of European newspapers these days is to be expected, I suppose. The average American – despite all the evidence chosen to pile up against him – is not as ignorant as we are led to believe, and the man or woman in the street has a fair idea why they are so stereotyped. After all, the president you get is the country you get.