You know that feeling when you're on a night out and one of the guests whom you've always relied upon, who's perhaps picked up the bill before, who's told great stories, suddenly stands up, begins ranting about buying the neighbour's garden shed, ...

The fate that befell Belmullet man Stephen Lavelle last month is the type of thing that ought to be a tipping point in discussions around reform of emergency care in Ireland.

There is something deeply unsettling about watching a life’s work reduced to a name on a list.

Putin tells the world, what we already know, that he has a nuclear arsenal that could destroy the world as we know it.

Brussels for us is more than a place. For when we say ‘Brussels’ we don’t mean the city: we mean either the European Union (EU) as an institution or use it as shorthand for a set of rules.

One of the most impenetrable conundrums in modern politics is the extraordinary grip that President Donald Trump has exerted on the minds and hearts of the American electorate.

It is worrying that a recent report found that almost 10% of young adults in Ireland believe the Holocaust was a myth and did not happen. Almost twice as many thought that the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust has been exaggerated.

In the good old days when you could rely on the Bible to come up with solutions to any sort of damnable problem. Life was simple.

There's a particular quality to silence you only learn when your offspring leaves home. It’s not the absence of noise but the unfamiliar silence that invades when the parenting purpose has been removed.

Around the time I was ordained in 1973 a major survey on religious practice in Ireland was published. Its main finding was that over 90% of Irish Catholics attended Mass every Sunday. (At the time there was no Saturday vigil Mass).