An outreach team learns the value of sharing their personal testimonies and what a little light can do to a community.

The Creative Arts team perform their Christmas show for school children all over Ireland in the course of three weeks.

Global (INTERNET) sensation Joseph Griffin will make his triumphant return to Las Vegas on Thursday, Nov. 19, to properly capture the sights and sounds of the iconic Las Vegas Strip. This time, he�ll film a few familiar sites from his original �selfie� video paired with a selection of only-in-Vegas surprises for this Irish Dad.

Irish business association Ibec has called for the establishment of a Commission on Taxation, as part of a package of measures to "reboot" the economy after the coronavirus pandemic.

The Irish headline rate of VAT will return to 23 percent from March, having been temporarily reduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Ireland, four out of five pregnant women are iron deficient by their third trimester. Researchers found that over 80% of women experience iron deficiency

Turnhout, Belgium : Brepols Publishers, [2020]

Dublin : Gill Books, 2018.

Manchester : Manchester University Press, [2018]

The government of Hong Kong has agreed and decided to double the number of work visas for the citizens of Ireland from next year on wards.With this announcement, a total number of eligible people for the scheme of working holiday of Hong Kong and Ireland…

Ireland’s economy is now showing encouraging signs of recovery from the financial crisis, but more must be done to reinvigorate growth and create the jobs that will get the country back to full health, according to the OECD.

This report on seeks to provide guidance on the design and delivery of a Youth Guarantee in Ireland based on the experience of other countries in designing guarantees or other comprehensive policy packages to help youth find productive and rewarding employment.

Ireland’s economy is now showing encouraging signs of recovery from the financial crisis, but more must be done to reinvigorate growth and create the jobs that will get the country back to full health, according to the OECD.

Archives, Room Use Only - DA990.V34 O25 1992

The importance of coral reefs in supporting diverse fish communities has been highlighted in a recent study. However, the effects of damaging fishing techniques were also observed in video footage of the reefs studied, located off the coast of Ireland.

Deep-water fish living along the Irish-UK continental slope remove more than a million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, according to a recent study. Continental slope ecosystems play an important role in carbon sequestration, which should be considered before exploiting deep-water resources, say the researchers.

The Irish public are sceptical of government and industry’s ability to manage the marine economy, finds a survey. However, they place a large amount of trust in scientists. The research also indicates that people living in Ireland have a reasonable level of knowledge of the importance of different marine ecosystem services.

You don't have to be Irish to try this whiskey-filled classic hot drink.

25-year-old wave runner Lindsey Russell undertook the 20-mile challenge to raise money for charity.

The medicinal soil called "healing soil" has been found to contain powerful antibiotics that kill superbugs.

Irish teen Fionn Ferreira won the 2019 Google Science Fair for removing microplastics from water.

Research out of Venice finds Irish dancing more helpful than physiotherapy for the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

Video shows a majestic murmuration of starlings flying across a beautiful Irish sky.

There are a number of Irish Wedding Rings that include Spirals, Triskeles, and Triquetas, Shield Knots and Sun Symbols. The most popular ring by far is the Irish Claddagh and it is surrounded by a romantic legend.

Mr Garrett Weldon of Weldons jewelers Dublin announced a new arrival in stock of a very interesting antique Irish silver salver, made in Dublin circa 1740, by Samuel Walker.

The Irish people are repaying a debt of gratitude to Native Americans suffering from COVID-19, 170 years after a tribe helped Ireland during the Great Famine.

The post Irish People Are Repaying Debt of Gratitude to Suffering Native Americans 170 Years After Potato Famine appeared first on Good News Network.

The retired Danish tennis star was once engaged to Holywood golfer Rory McIlroy

The Association is intent on having a new boss in place by July

It even involves some serious dance moves at the end

Ever since Ghostbusters, the go-to tactic for supernatural comedy is to show characters experiencing remarkable, seemingly impossible things and yet reacting with the kind of mild bemusement you get watching someone successfully parallel park.…

A £14 MILLION bid to buy a collection of more than 5,500 artefacts from the Titanic wreck site and bring them to Northern Ireland has been launched.

Richard Lutz takes in a long eulogy to the Mafia life.

A chance to spend the evening with Barry McGuigan.

Irish people are repaying Natives peoples for their help during the 19th-century potato famine by contributing to a GoFundMe for COVID-19 relief.

One of the almost unsolvable problems with the U.K.’s exit from the E.U. is that it would necessitate a “hard border” between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland, which would remain a member nation in Europe. The border was the epicenter of bloody conflict during the decades-long Troubles, and was essentially dismantled during the peace established by the Good Friday Agreement, in 1998. The prospect of fortifying it, with customs-and-immigration checks, has already brought threats of violence from paramilitaries such as the New I.R.A. At the same time, moving the customs border to ports along the coast of Northern Ireland—as the U.K.’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has proposed—strikes Northern Irish loyalists as a step toward unification with the Republic, which they would view as an abandonment by Britain. Patrick Radden Keefe, who wrote about the Troubles in his book “Say Nothing,” discusses the intensely fraught issues of the border with Simon Carswell, the public-affairs editor of the Irish Times.

Another international raider grabs the last automatic spot in the Melbourne Cup, with the Joseph O'Brien-trained Downdraft earning his spot with a win in the Hotham Handicap on Derby Day.

An Irish family, who has been living in regional Victoria for almost a decade, faces deportation after their son is diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.

Music celebrating the Emerald Isle--from Purcell to Beethoven, from John Field to Victor Herbert.

Our live PotterCast from LeakyCon 2017! We recount the amazing weekend we had in Dublin hanging with hundreds of Harry Potter fans. We also hear from a lot of you and give you a glance  behind-the-scenes at how LeakyCon gets made. Pluuuusss we talked about LeakyCon 2018 in Dallas, which was recorded before the whole dang thing sold out...

Cinematographers Rodrigo Prieto and Lawrence Sher compare notes on their films, 'The Irishman' and 'Joker.'

Thelma Schoonmaker began working with Martin Scorsese in 1967. Over the years, she says, it has become more of a collaboration.

The British and Irish Lions' tour of South Africa was due to take place next summer.

The Western world remains where it has been for some time, delicately poised between anaemic recovery and a shock that could tip us back into economic contraction.

Perhaps the most conspicuous manifestation of the instability is that investors can't make up their minds whether the greater risk comes from surging inflation that stems largely from China's irrepressible growth or the deflationary impact of the unsustainable burden of debt on peripheral and not-so-peripheral eurozone (and other) economies.

And whence do investors flee when it all looks scary and uncertain, especially when there's a heightened probability of specie debasement - to gold, of course.

Unsurprisingly, with the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, implying that a writedown of Greece's sovereign obligations is an option, and with consumer inflation in China hitting 5.4% in March, there has been a flight to the putative safety of precious metal: the gold price hit a new record of $1,480.50 per ounce for June delivery yesterday and could well break through $1,500 within days (say the analysts). Silver is hitting 30-year highs.

In a way, if a sovereign borrower were to turn €100bn of debts (for example) into an obligation to repay 70bn euros, that would be a form of inflation - it has the same economic impact, a degradation of value, for the lender. But it is a localised inflation; only the specific creditors suffer directly (though there may be all sorts of spillover damage for others).

And only this morning there was another blow to the perceived value of a chunk of euro-denominated sovereign obligations. Moody's has downgraded Irish government debt to one level above junk - which is the equivalent of a bookmaker lengthening the odds the on that country's ability to avoid controlled or uncontrolled default.

Some would say that the Irish government has made a start in writing down debt, with the disclosure by the Irish finance minister Michael Noonan yesterday that he would want to impose up to 6bn euros of losses on holders of so-called subordinated loans to Irish banks.

But I suppose the big story in the eurozone, following the decision by the European Central Bank to raise interest rates, is that the region's excessive government and bank debts are more likely to be cut down to manageable size by a restructuring - writedowns of the amount owed - than by generalised inflation that erodes the real value of the principal.

The decision of the ECB to raise rates has to be seen as a policy decision that - in a worst case - a sovereign default by an Ireland, or Greece or Portugal would be less harmful than endemic inflation.

But is that right? How much damage would be wreaked if Greece or Ireland or Portugal attempted to reduce the nominal amount they owe to levels they felt they could afford?

Let's push to one side the reputational and economic costs to those countries - which are quite big things to ignore, by the way - and simply look at the damage to external creditors from a debt write down.

And I am also going to ignore the difference between a planned, consensual reduction in sums owed - a restructuring that takes place with the blessing of the rest of the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund - and a unilateral declaration of de facto bankruptcy by a Greece, Ireland or Portugal (although the shock value of the latter could have much graver consequences for the health of the financial system).

So the first question is how much of the impaired debt is held by institutions and investors that could not afford to take the losses.

Now I hope it isn't naive to assume that pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and central banks that hold Greek, or Irish or Portuguese debt can cope with losses generated by a debt restructuring.

The reason for mild optimism in that sense is that those who finance investments made by pension funds and insurers - that's you and me by the way - can't get their money out quickly or easily. We simply have to grin and bear the losses to the value of our savings, when the stewards of our savings make lousy investment decisions.

As for hedge funds, when they make bad bets, they can suffer devastating withdrawals of finance by their investors, as and when the returns generated swing from positive to negative. But so long as those hedge funds haven't borrowed too much, so long as they are not too leveraged - and most aren't these days - the impact on the financial system shouldn't be significant.

Finally, if the European Central Bank - for example - ends up incurring big losses on its substantial holdings of Greek, Portuguese and Irish debt, it can always be recapitalised by solvent eurozone nations, notably by Germany and France.

However this is to ignore the node of fragility in the financial system, the faultline - which is the banking industry.

In the financial system's network of interconnecting assets and liabilities, it is the banks as a cluster that always have the potential to amplify the impact of debt writedowns, in a way that can wreak wider havoc.

That's built into their main function, as maturity transformers. Since banks' creditors can always demand their money back at whim, but banks can't retrieve their loans from their creditors (homeowners, businesses, governments), bank losses above the norm can be painful both for banks and for the rest of us.

Any event that undermines confidence in the safety of money lent to banks, will - in a best case - make it more difficult for a bank to borrow and lend, and will, in the worst case, tip the bank into insolvency.

Which, of course, is what we saw on a global systemic scale from the summer of 2007 to the end of 2008. That's when creditors to banks became increasingly anxious about potential losses faced by banks from a great range of loans and investments, starting with US sub-prime.

So what we need to know is whether the banking system could afford losses generated by Greek, Irish and Portuguese defaults.

And to assess this, we need to know how much overseas banks have lent to the governments of these countries and also - probably - to the banks of these countries, in that recent painful experience has told us that bank liabilities become sovereign liabilities, when the going gets tough.

According to the latest published analysis by the Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers'central bank), the total exposure of overseas banks to the governments and banks of Greece, Portugal and Ireland is "just" $362.2bn, or £224bn,

Now let's make the heroic guess that a rational writedown of this debt to a sustainable level would see a third of it written off - which would generate $121bn (£75bn) of losses for banks outside the countries concerned.

If those loans were spread relatively evenly between banks around the world, losses on that scale would be a headache, but nothing worse.

But this tainted cookie doesn't crumble quite like that. Just under a third of the relevant exposure to public sector and banks of the three debt-challenged states, some $118bn, sits on the balance sheets of German banks, according to the BIS.

For all the formidable strength of the German economy, the balance sheets of Germany's banks are by no means the strongest in the world. German banks would not be able to shrug off $39bn or £24bn of potential losses on Portuguese, Irish and Greek loans as a matter of little consequence.

This suggests that it is in the German national interest to help Portugal, Ireland and Greece avoid default.

If you are a Greek, Portuguese or Irish citizen this might bring on something of a wry smile - because you would probably be aware that the more punitive of the bailout terms imposed by the eurozone on these countries (or about to be imposed in Portugal's case) is the expression of a German desire to spank reckless borrowers.

But as I have mentioned here before, reckless lending can be the moral (or immoral) equivalent of reckless borrowing. And German banks were not models of Lutheran prudence in that regard.

If punitive bailout terms make it more likely that Ireland, Greece or Portugal will eventually default, you might wonder whether there has been an element of masochism in the German government's negotiating position.