Media

 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.

Rose-tinted memories of the Provisional IRA in Ealú; rural bar scenes to rival Flann O'Brien's in It Happened One Night and unintentional hilarity in The Restaurant.
By Dermot Bolger

 I was a “Marian groupie” for years. Just loved her easy sympathetic style, her capacity to pay attenti...

In and out of print, Meejit has been known to berate ideological foes, esteemed colleagues and shy students alike for over-reliance on the internet. Surfing so often results in lazy, lousy, lifeless journalism, not to mention the sort of junk that takes the odd posting to some web forum and turns it into, eg, a conspiracy to burn Dublin.

At a time when even the Irish Labour Party are wondering aloud about how and when foreign labour is best used, it was en...

As the current phase of the peace process stutters to its last gasp, there is an increasing need for the two governments to begin to flesh out a putative Plan B and ensure that the dynamism of the peace process is not lost in a welter of recrimination and lost opportunity, of petty point scoring and abandonment of the national interest for party political advantage.

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.

In November 1997 22 year old Raymond McCord was beaten to death and his body dumped in Ballyduff quarry in Newtownabbey on the outskirts of North Belfast.

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.

Student publishers fined €1,000 over possible offence to Muslims as other publications asked not to mention the incident. John Byrne reports