Last Monday the Bank of Ireland announced a new scheme to help businesses short of capital to access funds during the current difficult economic climate.
Envelopes play an unreasonably large and unwelcome role in my daily life. Once I became an elected representative, the vastly increased number of letters I began to receive took time to adjust to.
There is a picture-perfect serenity about the many streets off Dublin’s Merrion Road. Along their magnificent tree-lined avenues, loom in immaculate silence and inherent authority the buildings of many foreign embassies in Ireland.
Some time ago, while visiting Australia, relatives who migrated from the UK having worked as ‘ex pats’ in Sri Lanka told me that ‘the new immigrants should do as we did, work their way up and not expect anything from thegovernment.'
THE IRISH FILM Institute (IFI) and Cinema North West will present a major retrospective of film works based on the novels of Roddy Doyle from 12–14 September in Dromahaire, Co Leitrim.
I first met Ali and his family on the campus of a university in the northeast USA. I’d left my hometown for the first time, with a toddler and a newborn, for my husband’s return to graduate school.
IRISH AID, the Government’s official overseas development assistance programme, recently announced an internationally significant funding package to support fair and ethical trade with small farmers in east Africa over the next five years.
I have a dilemma. As a child, I never met a Muslim. When I saw pictures of women adhering to hijab – the Islamic code of ‘modest dress’, and also the name of the headscarf often worn by Muslim women – I assumed that their clothes had more to do with national dress, custom and tradition than with religion.
For the last number of weeks, you may have noticed grown men and women acting strangely around department stores and in major retail areas of towns up and down the country, shielding their eyes and crossing roads in order to avoid the inevitable but horrible ‘Back to School’ signs.
In Hebrew, my mother tongue, the word ‘barack’ means lightning. I know that lightning comes before the thunder, before the storm.
The suddenness of the economic downturn has taken many by surprise, and is throwing up all sorts of challenges to inherited thinking from the years of the boom decade in Ireland, particularly in regard to immigration.
The tragedy of writing a weekly column for Ireland’s only multicultural newspaper is that there always seems to be a current of racism and discrimination bubbling under the surface somewhere, either at home or abroad, that offends me enough to want to write about it.
The current consternation over the use of the phrase ‘segregation’ by the Fine Gael spokesman on education, Brian Hayes, is yet another false controversy around immigration.
A Fine Gael TD has called for the immediate reversal of Government policy which prevents adults from returning to education.
For my next trick, I decided that I was going to go Thailand’s neighbour Cambodia, to have a look at the effect the massive weapons stockpile it was lumbered with over decades of devastating upheaval was having on its troubled society.
August brings a few inevitable events that you could almost set your watch by: the poor weather, the media silly season and, with the advent of the Leaving Certificate results, the annual debate about the reintroduction of third level fees.