'I don't think any other game in the last 25 years or so has undergone such fundamental change as the game of rugby," says Ollie Campbell, one of the greatest rugby players of the modern era,...
Today there is a fortune to be made by those playing professional rugby at the highest level, but in an earlier era of the amateur game the reverse was the case - it was a game only the wealthy...
Ireland's first Woodland Festival will take place today at the estate of the late Lord John Kilbracken, who championed the cause of planting trees and re-introducing native species to his Co...
The bestselling author of The Ginger Man, JP Donleavy, has left more than €2m in his will.
Former finance minister Richie Ryan, dubbed 'Richie Ruin, Minister for Hardship' during his term of office, has left more than €3m in his will.
Everything he's touched hasn't actually turned into gold, but David McWilliams, who could be seen striding confidently around Dalkey last weekend, has done very well for himself. He has flooded the picturesque town on Dublin's ''gold coast'' with celebrities, and just how well his Dalkey Book Festival is doing is starkly illustrated by the programme in the Gutter Bookshop with "sold out" scrawled over most of the events.
The "wholesale destruction and redevelopment" of Dublin struck a chord with so many people that writer Hugh Oram got a book out of it.
A home on Shrewsbury Road in Dublin 4 is recognised in property and social circles as the pinnacle of financial success, and it was there, in a house called Ouragh, that Sean Dunne and Gayle Killilea disported themselves in some splendour as the property bubble inflated towards bursting point.
Lay of the Land, Fiona O'Connell's collection of columns from the Sunday Independent is "very human, very humble and a really good read", said Green Party leader Eamon Ryan TD at its launch last Thursday night.
'My dad was a retired army officer and he never got it," says Ronan Collins somewhat wistfully. "But that never stopped me."
The ball from the historic 1982 All-Ireland final was presented a symbol of the life of Eugene McGee at his funeral mass in St Mel's Cathedral, Longford...
Festooned with For Sale signs and religious symbols, Thurles is different from other towns in one significant respect - as the cradle of the GAA, even today it is infused with what it means to be Irish.
The battle for the Dublin skyline is set to dramatically intensify after developer Johnny Ronan submitted outline plans to Dublin City Council for...
Ornate panelling from the Titanic's sister ship will be sold in a historic auction next month.
If you want to know what it was like to sit in one of the richly panelled state rooms of the tragic Titanic, the opportunity will soon present itself...
'Eddie knew how to pick winners - and he wouldn't have learned that at school, because he left at 14. But he had the brains to know it was no good backing losers," said one of the many publicans who attended Eddie Bohan's funeral in Dublin last Wednesday.
In his lifetime, he went from a shop boy to a 'merchant prince' and at his funeral yesterday, Arthur Ryan was remembered as a self-effacing businessman who turned an old-style drapery shop in Mary Street, Dublin, into the headquarters of the internationally known brand, Penneys/Primark.
Legendary retail tycoon Arthur Ryan, creator of the Penneys/Primark clothing chain “loved his country and I hope his country realises how much he did for it”, said the CEO of Associated British Foods George Weston at his funeral in Dublin yesterday.
When his mother was pregnant with triplets, Gerard Dowling and his brother Tony were put into an orphanage for a couple of weeks. Ger was scared by the experience and ran away - "and he's been running away ever since", said his sister Roisin after his funeral in Dublin last Wednesday.
Her mansion was sold to the Mansfields, her gowns - by Dior and Givenchy - auctioned off by Adam's, her Picasso paintings stolen and her treasure trove of papers (including personal letters to her father from distinguished figures such as US President Franklin Roosevelt and Sigmund Freud) went to Harvard.
The Maria Bailey I met was a frightened public representative and mother of two children who was afraid to meet in a public place because of the abuse she and her family were getting from every direction.
Fine Gael TD Maria Bailey has instructed her solicitors to withdraw legal proceedings against the Dean Hotel in Dublin over a fall from a swing in which she says she was seriously injured.
FINE GAEL TD Maria Bailey is withdrawing her compensation claim against a Dublin hotel over a fall from a swing, Independent.ie can reveal.
'Veronica Guerin did not give her life for the freedom of the press or to expose the criminals or the drug lords who were destroying the lives of young people in towns and villages up and down the country," said her brother Jimmy. "Her life was taken from her because she did just that."
Socially, in business and in horse racing, Michael O'Leary has always been the outsider, the one who did it his way, without heed to what others thought of him.
It could have been so different. Without interfering with the integrity of Dublin as a Georgian city, the docklands could have been framed with Norman Foster's piercing U2 Tower on Britain Quay on the southside, Zaha Hadid's Tedcastle Tower on the north side, with Rafael Vinoly's Spencer Dock proposal soaring into the skyline over the Liffey.
On Sunday, April 17, 1949, the eve of Eire becoming the Republic of Ireland, the Sunday Independent proudly carried the story with the sub-heading "Guns Will Thunder and Trumpets Will Sound".
Cycling is healthy, eco-friendly, an efficient way for suburban dwellers to commute - and, at times, extremely bloody dangerous.
Tragic helicopter winchman Paul Ormsby, who was killed in the Rescue 116 helicopter crash off Achill Head, Co Mayo, left an estate valued at almost €900,000, according to documents lodged in the Probate Office last week.
Padraig O hUiginn, the former secretary general at the Department of the Taoiseach, was eulogised as a man with a "big heart and a great mind", his cousin Fr Vincent McDevitt told his funeral Mass yesterday.
Padraig O hUiginn, the former secretary general at the Department of the Taoiseach, was eulogised as a man with a “big heart and a great mind”, his cousin Fr Vincent McDevitt told his funeral Mass earlier today.
Elizabeth Flatley, the mother of millionaire Irish dancer Michael Flatley, left nearly €400,000 in her will, according to documents lodged in the Probate Office in Dublin last week.
The late John O'Grady, the Dublin dentist kidnapped by ''Border Fox'' Dessie O'Hare, has left more than €1m in his will, according to papers lodged in the Probate Office in Dublin.
'Oh my God, that was like an advert for the IRA," says Alan Partridge after his doppelganger, Martin Brennan from Sligo, has just done a medley of 'Come Out Ye Black And Tans' and 'The Men Behind the Wire' on his ersatz British chat show.
As the Department of Justice pleads "legal difficulties" for not going ahead with a Refugee Reception Centre in the village of Rooskey, the sorry truth is that the racist fire-bombers have succeeded.
People of a certain age can instantly guess the age of an Irish Marian. For a start, almost all Marians were born in 1954, and foisted with the name by their reverential mothers in honour of the Roman Catholic inspired Marian Year.
As the strains of The Fields of Athenry ring around Lansdowne Road today, the thoughts of Pete St John will not be very far from what he calls his "Famine song".
The Waterford businessman and minister of state Eddie Collins, who has died aged 78, was the only senior figure in modern Fine Gael to be sacked from government, having rejected what was regarded as the "honourable" option of resigning in the belief that he had done nothing wrong.
I mowed the lawn recently. Yesterday, I put on shorts for the first time this year.
By lunchtime yesterday, the small north county Dublin village of The Naul was suffering from a case of severe Lotto fatigue.
It is where the 3rd Duke of Leinster kept a mistress and today it is an upmarket wedding venue - but between 1959 and the mid-1960s, Martinstown House, near Kilcullen, Co Kildare was the lair of Otto 'Scarface' Skorzeny, Hitler's favourite SS commando and a Nazi 'Our Boys' hero.
The only official qualification Guinness heir Garech Browne ever obtained was a cabbie's licence - to drive a horse-drawn carriage.
Sitting in Slattery's bar as the slanting winter sun brightened the other side of the street, you wouldn't think Rathmines had changed an iota since I first walked across those well-worn floorboards and ordered a bottle of stout almost a half-century ago.
Entrepreneur Pearse Lyons, founder of the global animal nutrition group Alltech, who died in the United States almost a year ago, has left more than €21m in his will.
There were echoes of a bitter family feud in the will of a wealthy Dublin publican which went to probate last week.
The shiny new plaque, in black stone with gold lettering, commemorating the Soloheadbeg ambush - the event credited with starting the War of Independence on January 21, 1919 - claims that these first brutal killings of two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary began a campaign which "compelled the enemy to sue for peace".
Gary Hutch whose murder in Spain in 2015 sparked the brutal Kinahan/Hutch feud left estate valued at more than €21,000, according to documents lodged in the Probate Office in Dublin last week.
As he walked up the steps of the "dark gaunt house" on Usher's Island on the night of Little Christmas, January 6, "a light fringe of snow" on the shoulders of his overcoat, Gabriel Conroy was walking into a party that - 115 years later -will be recreated in Dublin again tonight.
Entering Jammet's restaurant, Dr Paul Singer found that the chair provided was uncomfortable for his 25-stone girth, so he borrowed the piano stool and settled down to dinner after a hard day arguing in the High Court in Dublin.
He doesn't remember the moment he first injected morphine - but Liam Farrell will never forget the consequences of what he now calls, "that pivotal act in my own destruction".
I've always wanted to have a pint of Guinness with a Guinness, but when I put it to Rory Guinness, he politely declines.
fAMOUS faces from the worlds of theatre and television joined family and friends at the funeral of Donall Farmer, RTE's former head of drama, who was probably best known as Fr Tim Devereux, the parish priest "with the kindly face" in the long-running television series Glenroe.
Famous faces from the worlds of theatre and television joined family and friends at the funeral of Donall Farmer, RTE’s former head of drama, who was probably best known as Fr Tim Devereux, the parish priest “with the kindly face” in the long-running television series Glenroe.
Twenty-seven years after they set off to join the space race, Ireland's four would-be astronauts were reunited in Dublin recently, a little older, but still doing what they were doing when they were recruited for the European Space Agency project in 1991.
As he served with British Intelligence in Persia and later Palestine, Bill Magan dreamed of the hunting fields of Westmeath which he had abandoned to go to war, and of re-establishing himself in Ireland in the style of an old Gaelic chieftain.
I was shocked at a recent GAA minor hurling match in south county Dublin at the undertone of violence on, and particularly off, the pitch.
Murder victim Derek Hutch, who was shot dead in a gangland feud in Dublin, left an estate valued at €136,360, according to documents lodged in the Probate Office in Dublin last week.
Like a lot of things, you only really see them when you start looking. The older woman pushing a young child in a buggy; the grey-haired man waiting each day at the school gate; the elderly couple hanging around the shopping centre with a clutch of kids still dressed in their school uniforms, waiting until 5.30pm so they can deliver them back to their parents.
What Jeffrey Bernard, who started each day with a vodka and orange juice for breakfast, was doing in Kerry seemed to be a mystery, even to him.
My daughter was coming home from babysitting one night recently when a fox casually trotted past her with someone's pet rabbit in its mouth.
When his rakish father John Stanislaus Joyce died in the Whitworth Hospital in Drumcondra, Dublin in December 1931, his son James requested that he be commemorated with a bench adjacent to the grounds where people could sit and chat.
If you put aside Shane Ross's obsession with the grey vote, his latest 'granny flat' grant is a very good idea on a number of levels.
Before there was the Playboy ''centrefold'' there was the erotic realism of Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World which was painted more than 150 years ago and inspired one of the great mysteries of the art world.
"He was an ordinary man who lived an extraordinary life," Alan Carr said at the end of the funeral Mass for his father Bunny in Sutton, Co Dublin yesterday. "But most of all, his story was a love story of Bunny and our mother Joan, who are together now," he added.
While it has not yet lived up to Brendan Behan's prophesy that it would "beat the bejasus out of the Bible", The Ginger Man has sold millions of copies around the world and spawned an industry once presided over by its author, JP Donleavy, and continued by his literary heirs, his adult children Philip and Karen.
The traditional music enthusiast and Guinness heir the Hon Garech Browne of Luggala, Co Wicklow, has left more than €4m in an eccentric 1985 will in which many of the beneficiaries, including his father and mother, Lord and Lady Oranmore and Browne, are already dead.
The owner of The Phoenix magazine, John Mulcahy, who has died in Dublin at the age of 86, was regarded by some as a muckraking publisher and by others as an editor who exposed the Irish elites to well-deserved scrutiny.
Michael O'Flaherty, who has died at his home in Guernsey at the age of 86, was the son of businessman Stephen O'Flaherty who made his fortune through acquiring the Volkswagen franchise for Ireland and England, becoming one of Ireland's richest men in the process.
The flamboyant horse trainer and gambler Mick O'Toole, who has died aged 86, had notable successes in training Davy Lad to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1977 and Dickens Hill to win the Irish 2000 Guineas, in 1979.
Writing this I'm listening, as I do around this time of year, to the plaintiff voice of Ronnie Drew on his final recording, singing Kurt Weill's September Song and thinking of the passing of time.
To a cacophony of church bells and helicopter blades, Pope Francis swept through Dublin city centre yesterday.
His leave-taking had little of the spontaneous entertainment that sometimes went on for days at Luggala, but then Garech Browne is gone, even if his spirit lives on in the brooding Wicklow fastness he once called home.
The photographer Art O'Callaghan had left Higgins's pub near the junction of Liffey Street and was making his way back to the newspaper's office in Middle Abbey Street, Dublin when a whirling mass of Chinese men spilled out of the doorway of a narrow little restaurant known as The New Universal brandishing meat cleavers, long kitchen knives and iron bars.
Eighty-year-old champion Bridge-playing barrister Barbara Seligman was wheeling her 14-year-old miniature toy Pomeranian dog Topaz in a pram towards the apartment she rents in Gorey from Mary Bowe - owner of Marlfield House - when a neighbour stopped her to admire 'the baby'.
There is an unexpected solemnity about Gavin Duffy, as he officially opens his campaign to seek a nomination to contest the Presidential election, which is expected to take place on October 28.
It was the sumptuous portrait of a beautiful woman dressed in Venetian carnival attire by the painter Sir Oswald Birley that caught the eye.
Treading water in the slightly snot-coloured Irish Sea off Blackrock, Co Dublin, one of the other swimmers pointed to the clear blue sky, splashed the water and said: "They still haven't found a way to tax the sheer pleasure to enjoying something for free."
The well-known gardening writer, horticulturist and wartime codebreaker Ruth Ross, whose son is Minister of Transport, Tourism and Sport, Shane Ross, left more than €4m in her will which went to probate in Dublin last week.
Towards the end of his 1997 book Thanks a Million Big Fella, Sam Smyth concluded: "Then there's Michael Lowry, who after suffering personal and political disgrace faces financial ruin and possibly prison... Michael Lowry was yesterday's man before he was 44 years old."
JUDGE John Blayney, who has died aged 93, had the distinction of scoring a spectacular try in his only appearance for Ireland at Lansdowne Road in February 1950, after running 40 yards with the ball to cross the Scottish line at a time when such exploits were rare in rugby.
As if on cue, the "snot green sea" beneath the Martello Tower in Sandycove took on a Mediterranean-like hue as the sun came out to give a Bloomsday of "mild morning air".
Leafy Eglinton Road doesn't so much drip wealth as ooze it. It is quintessential Dublin 4 with its mixture of red-brick villas, semi-d's of a very different kind to the suburban estates on the outskirts of Dublin, and some modest, but expensive properties, at either end.
Sports commentator and journalist Jimmy Magee left more than €1.7m in his will, according to documents lodged last week in the Probate Office in Dublin.
There was a certain air of one-upmanship in the sunshine-bathed government guesthouse Farmleigh, at the opening of Anthony Palliser's 'Irish Portraits' exhibition.
The showjumper Tommy Wade on his ''glorified'' Connemara pony, Dundrum, not only electrified audiences at the annual Horse Show in the RDS, Dublin in the 1960s but can be credited with popularising the sport of showjumping, then regarded as an elitist pursuit of the Anglo-Irish ascendency.
"Tom used to say the Greeks thought there was only one question worth asking about a man when he died: was he passionate?" Tom Murphy's widow, Jane Brennan, told the attendance at his funeral service yesterday. When they applauded, she continued: "Well, that answers that.".
When Modigliani's Reclining Nude was on display in Room 45 of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin for six years, it didn't cause anything like the stir that erupted after it was sold in Sotheby's "tepid sale" in New York last week for €133m, or indeed when the Parisian police closed down the gallery where it was first exhibited in 1917.
To President of the United States John F Kennedy she was 'Dear Dot' - and his warm and informal letters to her in the wake of his Irish visit typified the close relationship between her and the Boston/Irish clan which lasted a lifetime.
Former Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave has left more than €33m in his will, including €6,000 for Masses to be said for his soul.
Archbishop Thomas Croke and Michael Cusack must have been spinning in their graves but that didn't bother the rubber-lipped Mick Jagger and his ageing band of British rockers, the Rolling Stones, when they stormed Croke Park with the opening chords of 'Sympathy for the Devil'.
After a sojourn of more than five years, the heart of St Laurence O'Toole was returned to Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin last Thursday evening with all the pomp and circumstance befitting an 800-year-old desiccated relic.
Maureen Haughey, wife of the former Taoiseach Charles J Haughey, has left more than €9m in her will, one of the largest personal legacies recorded in the Probate Office this year.
"I could not think of a nicer homecoming than you have given me here today," an emotional and entertaining Sir Anthony O'Reilly told an audience of old school and international rugby friends at the opening of the O'Reilly Room in his old clubhouse in Dublin yesterday.
Maureen Haughey, wife of former Taoiseach Charles J Haughey, has left more than €9m in her will, according to papers lodged in the Probate Office in Dublin last week.
From the sophisticated radio and television studios where his music was rarely played to the by-ways around Oram where he was laid to rest last Friday, Big Tom exited stage left with a final chorus of Gentle Mother echoing behind him.
'I am the last of the vaudevillians," he says - and like most of his kind, Noel V Ginnity has that melancholy streak common to comedians, a moment when laughter turns to tears as he talks emotionally about a pivotal moment in life when he realised he'd almost thrown it all away.
On Friday last, The Irish Times published almost a full-page interview with businessman and political activist Declan Ganley in which he claimed that he never had "personal animus" towards businessman Denis O'Brien, who recently had him "joined" in what are now "conspiracy" allegations in the High Court.
I'm sitting in The Swan, a fine Victorian pub in Aungier Street, Dublin, having a usual Friday evening pint. But this Friday, it just doesn't quite seem the same.
'I'm good at this sort of s**t," declared Karl Brophy, the man behind Red Flag Consulting, in a text to the one-time Fianna Fail TD Colm Keaveney. They were texting back and forth about the billionaire businessman Denis O'Brien and how much he paid for his loans and the purchase of Siteserv from the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC), formerly Anglo Irish Bank.
A glamorous socialite with a glass of "bubbles" in her hand, Vi Lawlor became a by-word for style with the social columnists at a time when celebrity was in its infancy in Ireland.
The fascinating world where big business, lobbyists, politicians and the media intersect was aired over two days in the High Court last week, illuminating a web of texts, clandestine 'non-meetings' and secret briefings that led to front-page stories and headlines on television and radio news bulletins.
Two of Dublin's most respected clergymen over recent decades, who died within months of each other, have left contrasting fortunes according to documents lodged in the Probate Office in Dublin last week.
Some of those who became lifelong friends (the poet John Montague and film-maker John Boorman among them) would at first dislike the young Garech Browne, believing him to be a trust fund toff playing at being Irish with his Aran sweaters, tweed suits, his interest in antique horse-drawn carriages and the lavish entertainments at his remote castellated Wicklow home.
Whether or not newspapers can influence the outcome of an election or a referendum is arguable. But certainly the world's most powerful media mogul Rupert Murdoch believes they can, otherwise why would his newspapers continually intervene in everything from the Brexit referendum in Britain to the looming battle over the Eighth Amendment in Ireland?
Catherine Nevin, who became known as 'The Black Widow' in sections of the media following the murder of her husband Tom at Jack White's Inn, near Brittas Bay, Co Wicklow, was convicted of his murder and conspiracy to murder after a lengthy and highly publicised trial nearly 18 years ago.
We've all lived with Ireland's 'urban/rural divide' and claims that major infrastructure projects tend to go to Dublin, with the population shift which inevitably follows.
For historic reasons Waterford is lopsided, all on the south side of the deep River Suir which runs through the heart of the city. The north side was once the industrial port but when it moved to a new purpose-built site at Belview, in the early 1990s, the land on the north side of the river became largely redundant. Since then the city has continued to expand southwards into its Waterford hinterland.
The sudden volatility in the financial markets tumbling all last week on Wall Street should be a warning to Paschal Donohoe and the Government that the time has probably arrived for the State to get serious about cashing in its chips and bailing out of Allied Irish Banks.
Carpet king Des Kelly left a gross estate of more than €13m in his will which included charitable bequests to two Dublin homeless shelters and €71,425 for the canonisation of Matt Talbot.
Paddy Harte, who has died aged 86, said he was persuaded to stand as a candidate for the Letterkenny ward of Donegal County Council only because his father James had twice failed to get elected and following his sudden death at the age of 49, “I simply wanted to complete something he had started”.
An Irish nun has left more than €10m in her will.
She was the most famous Irish actress most people never heard of.
It should be very clear to us by now that politicians and civil servants cannot solve the housing crisis.
A casual observer might wonder why it took seven weeks, including 24 full days in the High Court in Dublin, to decipher an email headed: 'Pilot update: what the markets are saying about Ryanair'. Even some of those in court were perplexed by the length of a trial that was expected to last three weeks and ended in a humiliation for the Irish airline.
Stephen Ward, portrayed as a dark and malign figure in the life and downfall of the beautiful young Christine Keeler, reported here last week, was the wayward son of an English vicar and Irish mother, who came from a distinguished Irish landed family.
