Justine McCarthy

As a child, everything terrified me — darkness, the thought of being left alone, old Bill Slattery’s empty mansion across the road from our house. My antennae were always on the lookout for danger. The notion that this timorous mouse of a child would grow up to be a career witness to horrors and cruelties seems more fantastical than any bogeyman.

After...

Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Fein leader, has described the attendance of her deputy, Michelle O’Neill, at the coronation of King Charles as a “manifestation” of her vow to her electorate to be a first minister for all.

When asked by The Sunday Times whether O’Neill’s attendance was a sign of the future for Sinn Fein and if there was any concern about the...

Queen Elizabeth had often told Irish dignitaries whom she met that she had a dream to visit their country. She would have to wait for 59 years of her long reign before that dream came true. When it did, in May 2011, her Irish sojourn was adjudged a triumph.

Landmarks of bitter Anglo-Irish history studded the four-day itinerary for her state visit, the first...

And so ends a long goodbye. It is 13 years, to the month, since I joined The Sunday Times. Well-meaning friends and colleagues predicted at the time that the newspaper and I would make incompatible bedfellows. I being one of those bleeding-heart “pinkos”, to borrow the memorable parlance of the former finance minister Charlie McCreevy. And the newspaper —...

The combined salaries for three newly created public service jobs as media commissioners will exceed €500,000 a year.

The state is seeking applications for the position of executive chairman of the soon-to-be-created Coimisiun na Mean, the statutory media regulator, on a salary of €215,988, which is equal to the pay of a “level two” secretary-general.

Working...

The last time it was this expensive to exist, Ghostbusters was the movie du jour and the Blessed Virgin statue hadn’t even started twitching in Ballinspittle. It was 1984, George Orwell’s science fiction year of Big Brother and the Thought Police. Garret FitzGerald, a wizard with numbers reputedly able to recite the CIE bus timetable by heart, was the...

August is going to be an acutely difficult month for immigrants to Ireland, and the people who look after them. That is the prediction of various government and non-governmental sources who say last week’s meeting of a cabinet committee on Ukraine focused on a looming accommodation crisis.

“It’s serious now,” said one government source. “This is going to be...

An international air charter company is redirecting five Boeing 737 jets carrying more than 1,000 American passengers to Kerry airport, after Dublin said it did not have the handling resources to receive the planes.

Le Bas International (LBI), an air charter brokerage in California whose customers have included the American Ryder Cup team, Manchester United...

Shortly after Orla O’Brien was infected with Covid-19 for the first time, in March 2020, the 32-year-old occupational therapist began a new job specialising in palliative hospice care. She loved it. Then the pains in her chest started. Diagnostic tests showed her heart was severely swollen, placing her among the 30,000 people in Ireland, at a conservative...

Excuse us, but was it something we said? Or maybe our deodorant isn’t working full pelt and that’s why our national handlers can no longer bear to be around us. So they’re off. Suddenly, the state’s shiniest top brass are rushing for the exit. What exactly is causing this brain drain from the upper echelons of the Irish public service?

It started with Tony...

A report commissioned by Simon Coveney, the defence minister, has found that Donal de Róiste, a brother of the former presidential candidate Adi Roche, was wrongly dismissed from the Irish army nearly 54 years ago.

The state is now expected to issue a formal apology to de Róiste, 77, who has spent most of his life trying to clear his name.

Niall Beirne, a...

So Boris Johnson had an ethics adviser. Well, well, how counterintuitive is that? Next thing we’ll hear is that Donald Trump had his own pope tucked under the bed to hear his lurid nightly confessions in the White House, and Kim Jong-Un has a weapons decommissioner who sneaks out in the middle of the North Korean night to destroy his nuclear arsenal and...

First we got Sleepless in the Seanad, when Eugene Murphy, the Roscommon Galway senator, complained that hotel rooms were so expensive in Dublin he had to kip in his car. Then last week we got Destitute in the Dail, with Violet-Anne Wynne, the independent Clare TD, declaring herself “homeless”. Were Myles na gCopaleen to rise from the dead and write a sequel...

An independent TD is refusing to withdraw an accusation that Eamon Ryan, the transport minister, took a train to Limerick where he was collected from the station by his state car that had transported his bicycle from Dublin.

A spokeswoman for the Green Party leader said the allegation made in the Dail by Richard O’Donoghue, a member of the Rural Independents...

The wife of a businessman whose loans on land at the former Bessborough Home in Cork were taken over by Nama has emerged as the majority shareholder of the company that owns the site.

Richard Pratt, a financial-services company owner, bought 3.7 acres of the estate from the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary in 2008...

Before leaving for business meetings in the Middle East last weekend, Dalton Philips, the DAA chief executive, sent a buoyant letter to the TDs on the Oireachtas committee on transport and communications. While passenger numbers had outstripped all forecasts for the post- pandemic recovery, and 4.5 million people had passed through Dublin airport in April...

I once saw a billionaire going into Donnybrook Fair, the grocery chain that is to Irish food purveyors what Patek Philippe is to watches. I dared not follow to check what he was buying since at the time he was engaged in a lengthy correspondence with my editor over something I had written.

I mention this because I have never espied a billionaire or, to my...

A former British government minister has met the tanaiste and the finance minister to discuss his planned takeover of the Aughinish Alumina refinery in Limerick to protect it against Russian sanctions.

Greg Barker, a Conservative life peer with the title Baron Barker of Battle, met Leo Varadkar and Paschal Donohoe at Government Buildings on March 21. Two...

Billy Morgan, a former Cork football manager, has said he is mystified as to why he is named as the beneficial owner of land at the former Bessborough mother-and-baby home, where a Luxembourg-owned company wants to build apartments.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” the former all-Ireland winning goalkeeper said when asked why the Register of Beneficial...

At the funeral last Monday of Lisa Thompson, a 52-year-old Dublin mother whose stabbed and lifeless body had lain undiscovered in her Ballymun home for two days, the officiating priest said it was time we all asked ourselves a question. “As a society we need to stop and ask ourselves, why are we hearing of so many violent deaths?” Fr Declan Burke told...