As an Irish emigrant in America, I often find myself comparing the two societies. For years, Ireland looked west for inspiration on diversity and progress. The 'Land of the Free' was the ultimate model we all compared ourselves to.

Standing slumped under an American flag hung from a lamp-post, the clown looked as if he had died inside. The scattered passersby ignored him and his forlorn bucket of balloons.

Irish-America has always lived with its contradictions. On the surface: St Patrick’s Day parades, parish activities revolving around mass on Sunday and Danny Boy drifting out of pub doors into the night air.

My recent piece on President Trump’s “migrant crime wave” garnered social media commentary that said less about crime and more about how we engage with the news.

During college, I spent two wonderful summers working as a tour guide at the Céide Fields Visitor Centre in Belderrig.

Speaking at the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner last April, Donald Trump praised a fictional cannibal serial killer as a “very important force” in his presidential re-election campaign:“They used to go crazy when I talked about. . .

The man wore a New York Yankees cap, a beard and an oversized shirt, and he strode purposefully towards me while I stood on the pavement, watching the protestors gathered outside the Glendale Hilton Hotel.  As our eyes met, my heart sank.

The Lyft taxi driver urged his car through the late evening Los Angeles traffic, expertly manoeuvring around slower obstacles. His car radio crackled as a L. A.

The door slammed, causing our earthquake-proof apartment to shake on its timbered frame. In her damp coat, she stood dripping in the hallway, having caught the first rain of February as she walked up the exposed stairwell.

It was an afternoon in 2018 and I sat at my parents’ kitchen table working on my PhD thesis. I had a head cold, not in itself unusual as I seemed to always pick up any sinus illness going around, but especially that which blocked my inner ears.

My final Western People article of 2024 was not in keeping with the spirit of ‘Happy Christmas’ or indeed a ‘Happy New Year’, but one I felt compelled to write as a social historian, but also a proud native of this part of Ireland.

There have been times in my life when I have seriously doubted my own sanity, wondering why I chose to do the most stupid thing when the easier path was clearly better and way more sensible.

The assassination of Brian Thompson, the powerful CEO of UnitedHealthcare, has shocked corporate America.

Art O’Leary, the chief executive of the Electoral Commission, has just publicly admitted that the Irish electoral register could be inflated by as much as 500,000 names through duplication or through not removing people who have died.

Looking forward to the impending general election of 1918, the November 16th edition of the Connaught Telegraph delivered a sharp burn of the Sinn Féin candidate for North Mayo, Dr John Crowley, stating ‘from what we know of North Mayo, Dr Crowley ...

Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone had the numerical superiority, with the English army pinned between his Gaelic forces and their besieged Spanish allies in Kinsale town.

With America’s Rubicon election fast approaching on Tuesday next, November 5th, Donald Trump’s supporters seem increasingly confident of victory (at least publicly), while left-leaning commentators are sounding the alarm about troubling poll shifts ...

Donald Trump’s face is set in concentration, wading through almost hip-high floodwaters on some overcast, unknown street. He appears to be listening to his companion, likely discussing the extent of the inundation.

‘You could fry an egg on the sidewalk here… if it wasn’t already boiled in your pocket!” As I self-congratulated myself on my wit, an actor colleague from South Korea looked at me with a mixture of incomprehension and pity.

One of these candidates is much slicker than the other, is a much more practiced, kinda professional, debate-style speaker - and the other candidate won.

She was polite but purposeful. "I’m sorry to interrupt, but I overheard you say something about the Green Party in Ireland?"Her half-smile didn’t reach her eyes, and she leaned in almost anxiously, studying me.

It was one of those miserable post-Christmas weeks in Kerry a few years back when a local correspondent in The Kerryman summed up the news succinctly as: “No news this week”.

Vice-presidential nominees have “virtually no impact”, according to Donald Trump, when recently asked if JD Vance would be ready to take over "on day one if he has to be".

As the warm Californian evening falls, the latest news beams out from large flatscreen TVs across the stacked rows of apartments visible from our living room window.