By Tim Flynn

Charles Baudelaire's flâneur, the wandering observer of modern life, is usually associated with the boulevards and cafés of nineteenth-century Paris. Yet Ireland developed its own version of the type, not in grand arcades but in public houses, where conversation, storytelling, and sharp social observation…

By T.S. Flynn

From a colonial drapery supplying the anxieties of a distant outpost to a retail giant stripped bare in the digital age, the story of David Jones is the story of Australia itself. As online commerce, global capital, COVID-era disruption and a crushing cost-of-living crisis converge, the collapse of one of the nation's…

I arrived in Australia in 1992 expecting Crocodile Dundee, cheap beer, V8s, sunshine and opportunity. For a long time, that is exactly what I found. Looking back more than three decades later, I sometimes wonder whether the country that welcomed me has quietly disappeared beneath layers of regulation, soaring costs and diminished…

Nationalist, Volunteer, Soldier, Poet. Francis Ledwidge's life defies the neat categories later generations imposed upon Ireland's revolutionary era. A member of the Irish Volunteers who served in the British Army and mourned the execution of his friend Thomas MacDonagh, Ledwidge embodied the overlapping loyalties of a generation caught between Home…

I am Irish by heritage, grew up in England, and moved to Australia in 1992. More than three decades later, I remain grateful for the opportunities Australia provided me. Yet after watching the country evolve over 34 years, I have come to believe that many young Irish people contemplating permanent migration are basing their decisions on…

Brian Feeney is right to ridicule Britain's unelected bishops. But before Ireland lectures Westminster on democratic reform, it might first confront the privileged graduate franchise still embedded in Seanad Éireann.

By T.S. Flynn

In a recent Irish News column, Brian Feeney turned his attention to…

DOMHNAIGH-- On the morning of Nov. 1, 1920, two masses were celebrated at an altar that 18-year-old IRA member Kevin Barry had constructed in his jail cell in Mountjoy Jail in Dublin. Barry was then led out of his cell by British soldiers and hanged.…

Before conquest and colonisation transformed Ireland, the island was home to a sophisticated Gaelic civilisation governed by native law, kinship, and local sovereignty. Yet the Ireland remembered today is often as much a creation of nineteenth-century poets, folklorists, and revolutionaries as it is of medieval reality. From the kings of the…

I don't particularly like Ed Sheeran's music. I think Steve Earle wrote the better "Galway Girl", and one of Ed's Brisbane concerts once cost me a $140 parking fine. Yet living near Suncorp Stadium has taught me that his significance lies elsewhere. He fills stadiums, supports local businesses and helps sustain communities like Caxton…

My generation lived through the end of exile. We left Ireland before smartphones, social media, livestreams and FaceTime transformed emigration into a permanently connected experience. The digital revolution brought home closer than ever before, but it also complicated the question that has always faced emigrants: where do we truly…

Five centuries after the Reformation severed ties between Rome and the English Crown, a little-understood honour exchanged between Pope Leo XIV and King Charles III offers a remarkable symbol of reconciliation, mutual respect and Christian fellowship. For Irish people, whose history has been deeply shaped by the consequences of that…