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John Daly Opinion Unleash your inner Del Boy and negotiate a better deal this winter

We’re all going to need extra money to cope over the coming months, and I may have just the answer. Between rising energy prices, skyrocketing living costs and inflation dancing a tango of the damned, Shakespeare’s dreaded forecast – ‘now is the winter of our discontent’ – has never seemed so relevant.

Editorial Opinion An attack on free speech that should disturb us all

We are told that without heroes, we will never know how far we can go. Salman Rushdie has been the focus of global attention since 1988, when Iran’s then supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa denouncing his novel, The Satanic Verses, as blasphemous to Islam.

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Lorraine Courtney Opinion Yes, it’s hot, but can we please draw a line at wearing your bikini to the supermarket?

This summer has truly brought out the worst in us and the heatwave has only made things worse. All of a sudden, lush Ireland transformed into a dusty old tip with discarded drink cans everywhere and the abandoning of all conventions around summer dressing.

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Peter Power Opinion A year on from the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, educating Afghan girls remains a cause worth fighting for

A child’s enthusiasm is infectious and uplifting. It is a sight to cherish, and impossible to witness without returning a smile. Ever since I visited Afghanistan earlier this year, a joy-filled moment of hope, such as this, has stuck with me.

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Fionnán Sheahan Opinion Taoiseach’s glass-half-full view of Irish is admirable – but there are holes in his glass

A satisfactory solution to the Killorglin contention might be to put the Sam Maguire Cup up on the Puck Fair podium for all to honour, instead of the goat. The All-Ireland trophy is back ‘home’ in The Kingdom and is on quite a tour of the county.

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Julia Molony Opinion Someone finally has the courage to say the show can’t and mustn’t go on

The singer Ryan McMullan has cancelled his world tour this summer. He announced the news to his fans via a social media post last week. He has, he said, been “struggling a lot lately” with his mental health and has consequently decided to step back from the most crucial breakthrough moment of his career so far.

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Richard Curran Opinion Tax cuts will only raise prices –what we need is wage hikes

It is rare to have so much stock placed in the budget options discussed in the Tax Strategy Group (TSG) papers which were published last week. They are part of an annual ritual that sheds some light on what the Government could do at budget time.

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Eoin O’Malley Opinion Self-imposed hurdles hinder our efforts to house refugees

In a few weeks students will hopefully flock back to university campuses. For many the return will be made more anxious because of uncertainty as to where they’ll live. Their parents, paying for the pleasure, will also be anxious about whether they can afford to allow their child to live away from home in college.

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Declan Lynch Opinion Trump’s dark army of enablers are still taking the Mick

To understand Trumpism, you need to understand Mick Mulvaney. Trump himself is easy enough to read — you just assume the absolute worst and he delivers. But the Mick Mulvaneys of this world play a more complicated game.

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Chris Donnelly Opinion Female loyalists emerge from the shadows to tell their side of the story

From an outsider’s perspective, loyalist culture in Northern Ireland remains an unnervingly masculine affair. Parades, protests and bonfires at times appear to be the almost exclusive preserve of young men, and the spokespersons invariably offered up from within loyalism only seem to confirm this perception.

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Colin Murphy Opinion Old-fashioned digs are the way out of this student accommodation crisis

Recent days have produced headlines about the student accommodation crisis in the Connaught Telegraph, Donegal Live, the Mayo News, Tipperary Live, the Limerick Leader, the Westmeath Examiner, the Kerryman and the Connaught Tribune. A Waterford students’ union president warns it will be “worse than ever”. A Tipperary TD warns about it “spiralling out of control”. A Limerick businessman predicts “Armageddon”.

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Conor Skehan Opinion We’ll have to switch way we think if we want to save our electricity supply and stop the lights going out

When senior officials use words such as “challenging” and “ambitious”, then a minister knows they’re trouble.

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Fiona O’Connell Opinion Lay of the Land: It's time we got behind all our essential evergreen grafters

My lovely old landlord, Chris, may have hung up his cleaver in his butcher shop on Dublin’s Wexford Street, but the aptly named Evergreen greengrocer a few doors up is still in business, its cornucopia of customers spilling through the door and milling around shelves packed to the hilt with every conceivable fresh produce.

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Gene Kerrigan Opinion A Bertie Ahern comfort blanket cannot cover sins of the past

For a while now, the Bring Back Bertie Brigade (BBBB) has been on manoeuvres. Bring back Bertie Ahern, the argument goes, give him a meaningful official role in helping sort out the mess in the North. Well, sure, OK — we could do that, see how it works out.

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Sandra Kavanagh Opinion Why the summers of our yesteryear will always outshine these sultry, scorching days

Has summer delivered this year? It usually does, but sadly we are not always able for all it has to offer. In my case this year there’s a sheaf of yellow hospital appointment letters vying with cheery sunflowers in the vase.

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Rosita Sweetman Opinion History is collapsing – give us back our Iveagh Markets

I find it weird that while every city in western Europe is desperately trying to fight off the corporates, screaming “Get Lost Airbnb” and “Let’s Make Our Cities Great Again”, Dublin is being railroaded into an offices-and-hotels-only, high-rise, cement and steel desert.

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Shane Ross Opinion ‘Behold Leo, the landlords’ hero, the tenants’ hero, the hero of the squeezed middle, the dispenser of increased welfare payments’

Are you ready for the Fine Gael budget? You have to hand it to Leo. Last Wednesday, fresh from his holiday, the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise saturated Ireland’s airwaves, sharing glad tidings about what would be in Budget 2023.

The reaction to The Satanic Verses forced Salman Rushdie into hiding – but he would re-emerge

When Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding on Valentine’s Day, February 1989, it was not just the biggest cultural story of the moment; it was the biggest political story too.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Going grey in a sexualised world is a show of liberation women can take strength from

Broadcaster and writer Barbara Scully is a good friend of mine. Game for anything, she shows up full of energy and opinions and doesn’t do that thing of taking offence if you disagree with her. Apart from the fact she’s a foot taller than me, we’re fairly compatible pals.

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John Rentoul Opinion Liz Truss in Wonderland as she plays fantasy politics in race for No 10

The Conservative hustings were in Darlington this week, a mile from Charles Dodgson’s (or Lewis Carroll, as he was also known) childhood home, Croft-on-Tees. So we went through the looking-glass where the Remainer becomes the Brexiteer and vice versa, and Liz Truss, who launched her campaign as the change candidate, portrayed herself as the preserver of Boris Johnson’s legacy.

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Billy Keane Opinion Even a dash to the Croke Park toilet wasn’t enough to get rid of space invader who gave me Covid

I did the time, but there was no crime. Banged up I was, under house arrest after two red bars showed up on the Covid test. I’m not too bad, thanks for asking. I have it down on a man who was nearly close enough to kiss me at the All-Ireland football final between Kerry and Galway.

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Michael Kelly Opinion We probably won’t miss our priests until they’re gone

Twenty-five years ago, when I was in college, the sociologist Fr Liam Ryan wryly predicted that the church in Ireland would one day soon go the way of rural garda stations: “The local presbytery will be closed, and two curates will cover half the county in a squad car.”

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Richard Curran Opinion Why the Government must now hold its nerve and act responsibly for the long-term good

Now is the time for the Government to help the people most affected by the huge rise in the cost of living. Significant increases in the cost of food, services, fuel, energy, rent and possibly soon mortgage payments too, are putting enormous pressure on households.

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Louise McSharry Opinion Forget about bad parenting – those who cast judgment are a bigger problem

My husband and I were flying home from a weekend away with friends recently when we experienced a classic moment of the parenting genre. It involved watching someone else’s children misbehaving, and feeling relieved that you’re not currently wrangling your own kids through the airport.

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Sarah Carey Opinion Going grey in a sexualised world is a show of liberation we can all take strength from

Broadcaster and writer Barbara Scully is a good friend of mine. Game for anything, she shows up full of energy and opinions and doesn’t do that thing of taking offence if you disagree with her. Apart from the fact that she’s a foot taller than me, we’re fairly compatible pals.

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Tanya Sweeney Opinion If I could go back to my teens, I would treat the boys who approached me in bars or clubs with a little more humanity

I read an interesting interview with Hollywood actress Christina Ricci this week in which she notes that she would like another shot at doing the 1990s all over again. It was the decade in which she rose to stardom as a child actor (she was born in 1980), and ended it as a 20-year-old indie film star.

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Sonny Bunch Opinion People don’t want entertainment forced on them – just ask U2

As more consumers cut the cord and more players get into the streaming game, the entertainment world has divided into ever-smaller niches.

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I overstayed my US visa 26 years ago, and now my family must go on €15,000 Mexico trip without me

If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that the time we spend with the people we love is precious, because life is fleeting. There is a finite amount of time in which we get the opportunity to make the kind of memories that last a lifetime.

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Letters to the Editor Opinion Puck Fair is merely another sideshow of animal cruelty

It’s depressing to again hear tradition being touted as an excuse for subjecting a wild animal to a stressful ordeal for human amusement.

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Charlie Weston Opinion Watchdog has let big lenders off the hook and we will pay dearly for that

There is a delicate balance between dominance of a market and healthy competition. The mortgage business in this country is a particularly good case study of the impact of competition and what happens when competition weakens. All the more so as we have a small population.