Ireland

How to be good

28 October 2017 9:00 am

Suffering, wrote Auden, takes place ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. His…

Looking back, losing bits

16 September 2017 9:00 am

As Roddy Doyle’s 12th novel begins, Victor Forde, a washed-up writer, has returned to the part of Dublin where he…

Fudging Ireland’s border issue can only mean Troubles ahead

3 August 2017 1:00 pm

The question of what kind of border after Brexit will exist between Northern Ireland and the Republic will, I predict,…

The untrustworthy Winston Churchill, 1916

14 May 2016 9:00 am

From ‘Colonel Winston Churchill’, The Spectator, 13 May 1916: The return of Colonel Churchill to the House of Commons, which we are…

Might Eurovision determine the outcome of the EU referendum?

14 May 2016 9:00 am

You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how…

The Spectator’s advice on keeping Ireland quiet in 1916

7 May 2016 9:00 am

From ‘Reconstruction’, The Spectator, 5 May 1916: What Ireland wants just now is firm and judicious military government. The rebellion of last…

Irish Citizen Army soldiers on rooftops in Dublin before the Easter Rising of 1916

The holy relics of the Easter Rising: from hallowed flags to rebel biscuits

19 March 2016 9:00 am

The reverence for those involved in the Easter Rising is evident in an exhibition devoted to its centenary, says Harry Mount

Ireland’s new spirit of gentle maturity

2 January 2016 9:00 am

A gentle spirit has survived Ireland’s many changes

The micro-businesses that give me hope for Belfast

21 November 2015 9:00 am

At Stormont on Saturday, we observed a minute’s silence for the dead of Paris. Our conference group of Brits and…

Guinness and oysters — or beef and Haut-Brion — in deepest Ireland

21 November 2015 9:00 am

We were talking about the West of Ireland and agreed that there were few greater gastronomic pleasures than a slowly…

Maybe bitcoin isn’t the work of the devil, after all

7 November 2015 9:00 am

I confess to being an out-and-out Luddite when it comes to bitcoin and other so-called crypto-currencies. To the extent that…

Domhnall Gleeson as Jim Farrell and Saoirse Ronan as Eilis in ‘Brooklyn’

Colm Toibin on priests, loss and the half-said thing

24 October 2015 9:00 am

Jenny McCartney talks to unstoppable literary force Colm Tóibín about loss, priests and half-said things

Euroscepticism is growing all over Europe

3 October 2015 9:00 am

Europhiles have warned us for years of the dangers of Britain leaving the EU. But all the while a different…

If there’d been a Gilbert and Sullivan opera about Roland Barthes, it might have sounded like John Banville’s The Blue Guitar

12 September 2015 9:00 am

The Blue Guitar is John Banville’s 16th novel. Our narrator-protagonist is a painter called Oliver Orme. We are in Ireland,…

Dublin: a small town wrapped in a great city

Theatre, gossip and Guinness: the craic of Dublin

5 September 2015 9:00 am

What a delight it is to toy with a wooden newspaper-holder rather than a smartphone, tucked away in the cosy…

Prue Leith’s diary: When did weddings stop being for parents?

8 August 2015 9:00 am

My Cambodian daughter and her husband have just got married again. Wedding One was a Buddhist affair in our drawing…

Portrait of the week

30 May 2015 9:00 am

Home A Bill to enable a referendum on whether voters wanted Britain to ‘remain’ in the European Union figured in…

Charles Moore’s Notes: people who love making new laws like to present them as human rights

30 May 2015 9:00 am

Amnesty International and others have placed a large newspaper advertisement telling Michael Gove ‘Don’t Scrap Our Human Rights’. The ad…

A sombre Irish family saga — that glows in the dark

9 May 2015 9:00 am

The Green Road is a novel in two parts about leaving and returning home. A big house called Ardeevin, walking…

Why so many bankers secretly like Labour’s non-dom proposal

25 April 2015 9:00 am

The interesting thing about Labour’s pledge to abolish non-dom tax status — a squib designed to trap Tories into expressing…

Bet on a swift Grexit

21 February 2015 9:00 am

‘Will Greece exit the eurozone in 2015?’ Paddy Power was pricing ‘yes’ at 3-to-1 on Tuesday, with 5-to-2 on another…

A tatty new theatre offers up a comic gem that’s sure to be snapped up by the BBC

14 February 2015 9:00 am

New venue. New enticement. In the undercroft of a vast but disregarded Bloomsbury church nestles the Museum of Comedy. The…

Old mill boards and sea-green slates: Yeats’s tower

On the Yeats trail in Galway

24 January 2015 9:00 am

The Go Galway bus from Dublin sounds an unlikely pleasure, but it is both comfortable and punctual. There is free…

The subversive wonders of Kilkenomics – where economics meets stand-up

15 November 2014 9:00 am

‘What is a Minsky moment, anyway?’ asks Gerry Stembridge, an Irish satirist. ‘I’ve been reading about them in the papers…

A Troubles novel with plenty of violence and, thank heaven, some sex too

13 September 2014 9:00 am

‘The Anglo-Irish, their tribe, are dying. . . . They will go without a struggle, unlamented,’ Christopher Bland, 76, declares…