Perhaps it was the first weekend in December, it was Advent, anyway. Dublin had been filled with Christmas decorations, the shops stocked to overflowing.

Dublin was a long way away. In Burundi, probably the poorest nation on Earth, it was a day like any other. A day when the relentless, grinding poverty just ground its way onward.

The church service was to take place in a community that lay between Bujumbura, the chaotic capital city, and the Congolese border. To have travelled over the border, into the Democratic Republic of …

The man waved and smiled.  Distant, and unperturbed by the affairs of the world, he sat on a bench in the warmth of the evening sun. Some thought of happier times must have come to mind, prompting a half-smile to cross his face.

It evoked memories of a poem recited by Tommy Makem at the 1984 reunion concert with the Clancy Brothers. Makem had a love of poetry, his repertoire included Shakespeare and Heaney. The beautiful music of Carrickfergus seemed a fitting context for poetic words. In his inimitable way, …

Reading The Great Outsider: The Life of David Lloyd George, Roy Hattersley’s account of the life of the last Liberal prime minister, there is the unmistakable conclusion that Lloyd George was not a pleasant man. His years seemed to have been marked by a single-minded pursuit of what he wanted, whether in politics, or in his succession of relationships with women. Lloyd George’s tactic was not to argue on the basis of philosophy or policy, but to launch personal attacks on anyone who opposed him, even if they were within …