There is an old Irish saying that a land without a language is a land without a soul. Over the past couple of years, while working on the smallest of the Aran Islands, I tried to imagine how sad it would be if the last native Irish speaker passed away. …

When mass murder was taking place in Myanmar seven years ago, social media played a significant role in the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. For years, people had spread Islamophobic material on Facebook in a country of 54 million people, including conspiracy theories and grainy photos of atrocities supposedly carried out…

In almost 30 years of working as a journalist, an interviewee had never let me down like this or left me feeling so annoyed and frustrated. Here I was, sitting in a Galway bar, waiting for a woman from Nigeria to sit down for a coffee and tell me about…

by Ciaran Tierney It was the kind of ‘scoop’ most investigative reporters dream of. I can still remember the excitement the moment my phone rang. A senior opposition politician, on his way home from the Irish parliament for the weekend, had pulled in at the side of the road to…

By Ciaran Tierney When he got to the Cliffs of Moher, all he could do was find a quiet place to sit down and cry. For almost 60 years on this earth, he had dreamed of a moment like this. Now that it was upon him, he was overwhelmed. He…

When “patriots” stormed the US Capitol Building in Washington DC in January of last year in a bid to thwart the peaceful handover of power, people in Ireland consoled themselves that those kind of scenes would never occur here. Four years earlier, when a far-right extremist, Richard Spencer, greeted the…

By Ciaran Tierney As the world looks on aghast, rightly, at the slaughter in Ukraine, it seems that some of the Irish politicians who championed the rights of Palestinians –and turned occupation into an election issue — have simply moved on. When Israel was accused of practicing apartheid in the…