Five years after the French parliament passed a law forbidding children from wearing the headscarf or any other “conspicuous” religious symbol in schools (read as forbidding Muslim girls from wearing the veil in public schools), the French government
When post-conflict Northern Ireland was dubbed the ‘race hate capital of Europe’ by the BBC in 2004, my colleague Robbie McVeigh made the point that it was wrong to say, as many journalists did, that racism escalated simply because Protestants and
Last week I attended the humanist funeral of David Marcus, Ireland’s foremost literary editor, who supported scores of writers by publishing their short stories, novels and poems through his work as literary editor at the Irish
On the eve of Israel’s 61st Independence Day last week, the country’s police arrested six Israeli Jewish feminist political activists – members of New Profile, the movement for the civil-isation of Israeli society, including a 70-year-old woman
On 19 January I attended the Holocaust lecture in Trinity College. The lecturer, Dr Nicholas Stargardt of Oxford University, spoke about Jewish children hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. I happened to sit next to a stalwart member of the Dublin Jewish
What a start for the New Year! On 27 December, the Israeli Defence Forces launched an attack of unprecedented scale on the Gaza Strip. According to the Israeli government, the attack was in response to unyielding Palestinian rocket and mortar fire into Israel