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DavidMcWilliams.ie has gone from strength to strength over the last few years and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you, the readers, for coming back to the site time and again and contributing to it’s success with your comments and opinions. So we can develop the website further and make sure we’re providing…

There is a famous scene in the 1976 film, The Outlaw Josey Wales, starring Clint Eastwood as the eponymous hero. During a particularly brilliant exchange, the bounty hunter Fletcher, hot on the heels of Wales, comes out with an inspired put-down to the cowardly senator who is trying to pull the wool over his eyes….

This weekend, friends from Uruguay visited. For Guillermo O’Neill and his wife Alessandra Lawlor, the trip was a sort of homecoming. They are part of the great Irish Tribe down in Latin America. Their great grandparents left here — from Navan — at the turn of the 20th Century and they have kept their Irish…

Have you ever gone to a gig so ridiculously funny that you can’t actually communicate with the person beside you? You are reduced to grimacing; words just can’t come out, tears and snorts, yes, but words, no. When I finally pulled myself together at Tommy Tiernan’s latest show in Vicar Street, it struck me that…

Did you ever have a teacher who was compassionate to his or her students? Did you have a teacher who took so much interest in individual pupils that they’d take the time to worry about whether the student was good enough for honours or pass papers? This was done with the welfare of the pupil…

It’s the day of the Easter Bunny – the ancient sign of fertility – and “breeding like rabbits” is exactly what we are up to. Traditionally, fertility is celebrated around the spring equinox and, given the fecundity of rabbits, they became a symbol of fertility and of Easter. The census, which came out last week,…

Ernest Hemingway was once asked how did he go bankrupt. The great man thought for a second and then replied: “I went bankrupt in two ways, gradually and then suddenly.” When we see the figures coming from the various banks, it is not difficult to see that something similar is happening in Ireland. Whether the…

“Nothing so undermines your judgement as the sight of your neighbour getting rich,” wrote JP Morgan in 1905. As I write, a telecom company is digging up the street outside the window, laying cables, promising me the world from my living room in a matter of months. The gouging out of Ireland’s road network is…

Have you noticed how expensive petrol is these days? It now costs over €100 to fill up an average family car. In Ussher’s Quay the other day, there was a tailback of cars because a petrol station decided to offer a cut-price deal on petrol. Why is the price of fuel going up? Lots of…