In The News

On Monday, preparatory works began at the former site of the mother and baby institution in Tuam, Co Galway in advance of the long-awaited excavation to identify the remains of nearly 800 infants.

The excavation, which is due to start in mid-July, takes place 11 years after research by local historian Catherine Corless found 796 children had died at the institution run by the Bon Secours religious order between 1925-1961.

H...

On Sunday night, 57-year-old Vance Boelter was arrested and charged with murder following the largest manhunt in the history of the US state of Minnesota.

Mr Boelter is suspected of shooting and killing a Democratic politician and her husband and of shooting and wounding a Democratic senator and his wife on Saturday.

That same day, Donald Trump celebrated his birthday by holding a carefully choreographed military parade in Wa...

On her last gruelling day on the stand in the murder trial that has gripped Australia, Erin Patterson faced three succinct questions from the prosecutor.

She put it to Patterson that she had deliberately sourced death cap mushrooms in 2023, deliberately included them in the beef Wellington she served her former in-laws; and did so intending to kill them.

Patterson uttered three words: Disagree. Disagree. Disagree.

She is a...

Valerie French Kilroy was the mother of three very young boys, an occupational therapist and a much-loved sister and friend.

In June 2019 she was murdered by her husband James Kilroy. She was 41. That he killed her was never in doubt – he admitted it – but the defence put forward at his trial in 2024 was that he was insane when he beat, stabbed and strangled his wife to death.That defence was rejected by the jury and he was conv...

The election for the next President of Ireland must take place before November 11th. It’s June, so where is the list of Áras hopefuls?

As of now two independents have declared their intention to run, MMA fighter Conor McGregor and former candidate and businessman Peter Casey. They have yet to get local authority approval.

When can we expect the race to get going and what qualities make for an ideal president?

Harry McGee f...

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris had much to show the media at an event at Garda HQ on Monday.

New riot gear, a massive water canon, smart body-worn cameras, hand-held computers and more secure vehicles, part of the force’s fleet, the largest ever.

Questions why one piece of useful equipment – a cadaver dog – was not on the list of new acquisitions were eagerly asked by the media, and easily answered by Harris.

The new kit g...

The Government will bring its latest housing fix to Cabinet today when it presents new rules on rent levels for approval.

Aimed at boosting supply – by encouraging large institutional investors to build and small landlords to stay in the market – the plan primarily concerns rules around Rent Pressure Zones (RPZ).

These were established in 2016 – the number of such zones grew over the years – to curb rent rises. Landlords coul...

On Sunday, April 7th, 2024 there was a fatal road traffic crash in Churchtown, a suburb in south dublin. It happened early in the morning when a pensioner driving an old red van hit a tree.

Unusually, the name of the dead man was not released though The Irish Times was able to report, through confidential information received at the time, that the dead man had been due in court the following day.

He had been charged with more...

Sonia ‘Sunny’ Jacobs was 76 when she died on Tuesday morning in a house fire in Connemara.

Her tragic death made headlines far beyond Galway and Ireland because Jacobs had led a truly remarkable life. It included a death row sentence for the murder of two policemen in Florida in 1976.

She spent 17 years in a US jail, five in solitary confinement, before a deal with prosecutors saw her released in 1995.

Another person died ...

Children operated on when there was no need; industrial springs being used instead of approved medical devices; a doctor diverting children to his own private clinic leading to them facing dangerous treatment delays; and a poisonous work culture on the wards – these are some of the issues that have emerged in our children’s hospitals.

And that’s before the not so little matter of the massive budgetary and time overruns that plag...

In the early hours of May 8th, two masked men in a stolen Audi staged a drive-by shooting, firing nine shots indiscriminately at houses on Limerick's Hyde Road, including at April Collins’s home. More shots were fired at a Collins-owned home on the Hyde Road in November 2024, and in two separate attacks in January 2025. Since then, there have been a dozen violent incidents, including pipe and petrol bomb attacks. The Garda Emergenc...

Kerry farmer Michael Gaine’s disappearance on March 20th was first treated as a missing person’s case.

Soon though, it was upgraded to a murder investigation as the Garda searched for his body and explored multiple lines of inquiry.

Then the farmer’s body was found – in the most grisly of circumstances. He had been dismembered with his body parts deposited into the silage pit on his farm.

One such line of inquiry involved ...

From the moment he reported her missing in 2017, Richard Satchwell stuck to his story that his wife Tina had run off.

His many media appeals begged her to come home. But as the jury heard during his five-week trial in the Central Criminal Court for her murder, she was indeed home and she had been all along.

Richard had killed her in 2017, dug a hole under the stairs of their terraced Youghal home and buried her.

The Garda ...

Shane O’Farrell was 23 when he was the victim of a hit-and-run near his home in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan. A law graduate, he had just submitted his master’s thesis and was enjoying a carefree cycle on that August evening in 2011.

Questions around how the crash happened soon turned to who was behind the wheel. It was Lithuanian Zigimantas Gridziuska, a man known to the Garda and the courts.

On the day he killed Shane and dr...

Nearly thirty years ago, in August 1996, 25-year-old Fiona Pender disappeared and was never seen again. Detectives have always believed Ms Pender, who was seven months pregnant when she vanished, was murdered on the day she was last seen alive. However, her remains have never been found.

Earlier this week, gardaí announced the case had formally been upgraded to a murder investigation and began a search and excavation operation a...

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has published its latest projections for the 2030 climate targets and it’s bad news for Ireland.

The Irish State has the worst emissions per capita in Europe – projections show our greenhouse gas emissions will fall by just 23 per cent by 2030, compared to our original national target of 51 per cent, according to EPA data published on Wednesday.

The latest figures indicate none of the...

Five years ago, and three months into the 2020 global pandemic, the Leaving Cert was cancelled.

The Department of Education announced in May 2020 that students due to sit their final school exams would instead receive predicted or ‘calculated’ grades from their teachers.

These much more generous results led to grade inflation which has seen tens of thousands of students receive bumper Leaving Cert results in recent years. The...

Butter is becoming a luxury item. Rents have reached an all time high – just two examples of prices that seem to be constantly on the move upwards. 

Good news for the hard-pressed consumer is in short supply – even as inflation has reduced to around 2 per cent. 

And to add to the uncertainty, US president Donald Trump on Friday said he will impose a 50 per cent tariff on goods from the EU starting on ...