In The News

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 s...

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...

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...

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 g...

Former US president Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer paused the avalanche of damning stories about his mental acuity and cognitive fitness for office during his presidency. The leaks and pre-publicity around a new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Alex Thompso...

A new investigation drawing on thousands of internal emails and documents reveals the activities of Pravfond, a Russian organisation established in 2012 with the stated goal of protecting the rights of Russians living abroad, primarily by offering assistance in legal matters. However, the EU and European intelligence agencies say that in some countries Pravfond acts as a safety net for Russian int...

The trial of Richard Satchwell, who has pleaded not guilty to murdering his wife Tina at their home in Youghal, Co Cork in March 2017, has now entered its fourth week. The first three weeks of this high-profile trial featured testimony from gardaí, crime scene managers, the family doctor, a forensic archaeologist and friends regarding the disappearance of Tina Satchwell in 2017 and the discovery o...

On Monday morning, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu posted a video on his Telegram account pledging to take control of all of Gaza . “We are going to take control of all areas of the Strip, that’s what we’re going to do,” said Mr Netanyahu in the video. He also addressed Israel’s humanitarian aid blockade into the besieged area, saying “minimal” food aid would be allowed into the strip,...

Kerry farmer Michael Gaine disappeared in March. In April Gardaí upgraded the search to a murder inquiry, despite not finding a body. Now, following a macabre discovery, a man has been arrested on suspicion of murder. Irish Times southern correspondent Barry Roche explains what we know. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ten years ago this week, on May 23rd, 2015, the people of Ireland voted to legalise same-sex marriage. Writing in The Irish Times the day after the referendum, columnist Fintan O’Toole noted the overwhelming victory for the Yes side “looks extraordinary” but was actually “about the ordinary”. “Ireland has redefined what it means to be an ordinary human being,” wrote O’Toole. “Everybody gains from...

From the end of June, the people of Ireland will no longer be able to pick up the phone and talk to Joe. Last week, Joe Duffy announced he was leaving his role as presenter of the RTÉ radio phone-in show after 27 years in the hot seat. The 69-year-old broadcaster, whose contract was due to expire this summer, said he was “deeply privileged and eternally grateful” to have worked for so long present...

Mark Paul on why UK prime minister Keir Starmer evoked the arguments for Brexit - which he had opposed - when announcing a new crackdown on migration into the UK. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Members of Gaeltacht community groups and Irish language campaigners have issued a stark warning. They say the lack of housing, and oversupply of short-term holiday lets in Gaeltacht areas, is displacing native Irish speakers from their home counties. As a result, many fluent Irish speakers, who seek to bring up their families fully immersed in the Irish language and return home to their native to...

"The future can be seen" was the tagline of 2002 dystopian cop thriller Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise prevented crimes yet to take place with the help of a snazzy screen and three psychics floating in a tank. Now Gardaí want to use AI technology to do the same - well, kind of the same. Proponents of the technology say it will help avert criminality driven by online disinformation, like the...

A group of men dubbed the “grandpa gang” are among 10 suspects on trial in Paris on charges of robbing reality TV star and entrepreneur Kim Kardashian at gunpoint and stealing jewellery worth millions of euros during Paris Fashion Week in 2016. The billionaire business woman will be in court tomorrow to give evidence. Saskya Vandoorne, a senior producer for CNN based in the network’s Paris bureau,...

US-born Robert Prevost, who worked in Peru for two decades and became a citizen there before becoming a cardinal, is now Pope Leo XIV. But what sort of pope will he be? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For years tourists have been told it’s a tradition in Dublin to rub Molly Malone’s breasts – “for luck”. Something that’s news to residents of the capital. And it is causing damage – not just to the look of the piece but also to its stability and that has prompted Dublin City Council to take action. Every day this week “Molly minders” were at the statue with one job – to stop tourists climbing up...

India has conducted what it has described as “precision strikes” in neighbouring Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, days after it blamed Islamabad for a deadly attack on the Indian side of the contested region that killed 26 people. At least 26 civilians were killed and 46 injured by the Indian strikes, according to Pakistani officials. The Indian government claimed that nine non-military...

In the early hours of Monday morning, a drone carrying a pipe bomb, a viable explosive device, crashed beside a family's home in North County Dublin. But who was controlling the drone and who or what was the intended target? Irish Times security and crime editor Conor Lally reports. Presented by Sorcha Pollak, produced by Suzanne Brennan. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information...

Chad now hosts 1.3 million forcibly displaced people, according to the UNHCR, despite itself being one of the world’s poorest countries. More than half of these refugees are Sudanese, mostly women and children, who have fled the fighting between rival militaries which erupted in April 2023. It has been called “the forgotten war” because of the lack of media coverage and global attention particular...

Note: This episode was originally published in August 2023.  In July 2023, four relatives attended a family lunch at the home of Erin Patterson, a mother of two from Leongatha in Australia. Within days of the lunch, three of the guests were dead, with a fourth left fighting for his life in hospital. A beef wellington that was served for lunch on the day is suspected to have contained poisonou...

On Monday, the unthinkable happened: Spain and Portugal experienced an electricity blackout. Just after midday the lights went out, wifi went down, trains stopped, airports closed, ATMs froze and everyday life for millions of citizens ground to a halt. Both countries quickly ruled out the possibility that the outage was caused by a cyberattack. Human error was also discounted. Critics of Spain’s a...

For Kneecap’s growing fan base, the band’s support of Palestine as they performed at the Coachella music festival in California last month didn’t raise a ripple of surprise. The Belfast-based rappers who sing mostly in Irish have been consistent in their vocal opposition to Israel’s response to the October 7th Hamas attack. But an American backlash coincided with UK police investigations into comm...

Since taking over the Department of Justice, Jim O'Callaghan has embarked on a firmer, more hardline approach to immigration in this country. New legislation brought forward by the Minister this week and approved by Government, will speed up the time it takes to process an application for asylum, reducing the entire process from years to just a matter of months. However, the number of people seeki...

On Monday, a jury of seven women and five men was sworn in for the trial of Richard Satchwell at Dublin’s Central Criminal Court. The 58-year-old is accused of murdering his wife Tina Satchwell, at their home in Youghal Co. Cork in March 2017. The trial is expected to take six weeks. Gardaí initially treated Ms Satchwell’s disappearance as a Missing Person’s Case, but it was upgraded to a murder i...