For it was a strange thing about the silly season in journalism that there was in fact a major news story underway in the North. In July and August, there were over 120 attacks on Catholics. Homes, schools and churches were petrol-bombed and paint-bombed. A child was stabbed to death and sectarian assaults were rampant.
George W holidayed so hard in Texas he got bushed. He needed a holiday from his holiday. The most rested president in American history headed West to get away from his Western getaway – and the mushrooming Crawford Woodstock – and spend a couple of days at the Tamarack Resort in the rural Idaho mountains.
Overheard in the baggage reclaim area of Malaga airport a few weeks ago: Him: Yew watch out fir it – it's your bleedin' bag.
RTÉ Radio 1 is like a divine mystery: three stations in one odd bod. There's Radio 1 the Father (serious culture and education), Radio 1 the Son (news and current affairs) and Radio 1 the Spirit (light entertainment and "human interest", sport).
Dermot Bolger looks at dingy pitches, dictator dads and the downfall of three of the world's most powerful leaders
Last Thursday, Raglan Road merely provided a handy means of avoiding the crowd headed to Landsdowne Road for the Ireland Ruby friendly. But the next night, when Luke Kelly sang of it, and I listened from my garden bench in Clare under that lovely moon, 'Raglan Road' was again mythical; the poet Paddy Kavanagh was wastin' his time on the young one and Luke's voice was again in the business of breaking your heart.
In the aftermath of two No referenda, the European Commission is trying to change its image to listen, communicate, and go local. It has a long way to go, writes Conor Brady
It was 1968. I was in a tent in a field. Outside Clones. There were three other people in the tent. Two were playing the fiddle. Separate fiddles that is. Nothing remarkable about that given the weekend that was in it. We were in Clones for the Fleadh. There were tents all over the field peopled by musicians playing on fiddles or flutes or pipes or squeeze boxes or whistles or even, horror of horrors, the odd buzuki or some other such stringed instrument. And that was only the players who couldn't get playing in the myriad sessions in town or who had just returned from so doing.
Sceince in the media ranges from the dull and heavy to tabloid "shock discoveries".
Richard Nixon once gave me a lesson in the politics of war. Howell Raines, then the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, took some reporters to meet Nixon right before the 1992 New Hampshire primary. The deposed president had requested that Howell bring along only reporters who were too young to have covered Watergate, so we tried to express an excess of Juvenalia spirit.