About seven years ago, my wife and I participated in a Mass in San Antonio, Texas, where the main celebrant was a woman. We were part of about thre...

"An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick" From William Butler Yeats’s poem "Sailing to Byzantium." I recall well an unlikel...

The census figures for Northern Ireland released last September show Catholics, broadly understood, at 45.7%, and Protestants, or people brought up...

Some readers may remember the Stonewall riots that took place in Greenwich Village in June, 1969. The Stonewall Inn was one of a number of bars, mo...

An outsider looking at Ireland’s hundred years of independence would surely be astonished by the gradual transition from rags to riches. The countr...

In Greek mythology the River Lethe was deemed very important because those who drank from it in the underworld experienced complete forgetfulness a...

The wisdom of Oliver Goldsmith’s powerful lines in his moving 18th century poem "The Deserted Village" resonates today at a time of flagrant inequa...

Gabriel Byrne’s recent Broadway play "Walking With Ghosts" deals with the actor’s life growing up in Dublin as the eldest of six children in a work...

I came to America on a student visa in the summer of 1968. I travelled with a college friend, Ignatius Coffey, who hails from Labasheeda in County ...

When John Healy, the great Irish Times columnist in the 1970s, faced covering a bewildering political situation in Ireland he would playfully plead...

Donald Trump is America’s strongman. On election night in November, 2020, he claimed that with over 70 million voters he had won the approval of a ...

The great Shakespearean drama "Macbeth" issues a clear warning to power-hungry and unscrupulous leaders about the consequences of their actions. “T...