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Tanya Sweeney Opinion Medical gaslighting makes me furious — too many women are being let down by our healthcare system

In the week that CervicalCheck campaigner Lynsey Bennett spent in a cemetery, when by right she should have been at home with her children, another funeral was taking place. The details were horribly, tragically similar. This was the funeral of the mother of a two-year-old child, also in her thirties. In the front row sat a young widower, stoic but shell-shocked, flanked by young siblings. His little toddler, dressed in a puffer jacket, chatted with family members , ducking around the altar as toddlers do, seemingly oblivious to where they were, and the fact that this would be as physically close as they would ever be to their mother again. “They won’t remember any of this, thank god,” someone said to me afterwards as I cried about the reality of this child losing their mother. I still don’t know if what they said is a good thing or not.

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John Downing Opinion Voting pacts are often a great idea – but history teaches us that they do not always work out

My father was what used to be called a “plumper” at elections. He believed politics was given to one much the same as the Catholic religion, and bracing the ballot paper, he voted for Fianna Fáil candidates only, stopping dead thereafter.

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Dearbhla Richardson Opinion Paper straws won’t stop climate change in an age of mass consumption – but COP27 is last hope for survival of the planet

COP27 is not our last chance to averting the full impact of climate change, because we have missed that chance.

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John Connell Opinion Poet, sage, troubadour – Bob Dylan is a living hero whose abiding vigour graced us in Dublin again

This week we had a special visitor to Ireland – a man of mystery and wonder, a cowboy and troubadour, a visionary and mystic. There are few things Nobel prize laureate Bob Dylan can’t do. He has been a figure in popular culture for more than 60 years, and Monday’s concert at the 3Arena was an event that seemed to speak of his greatness and longevity.

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Édaein O’Connell Opinion ‘Sure chuck the kids in the air fryer while you’re at it’ – how we’ve all become infatuated with a household appliance

I truly believe the people of Ireland have lost their minds. We were fine, you know. We went about our days as normal. We had breakfast, took a quick glance at the news, muttered a few unkind words about the Government, then had lunch and dinner.

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Ellen Coyne Opinion Twitter is a spoofer’s paradise - anyone with the 'right' followers is one thread away from being invited on TV to shape national policy

Writing this article a few days before you’ll read it, I wonder if Twitter will even still exist by the time this is committed to ink and paper. Even to those of us who aren’t on the app anymore, it seems, from a distance, that Twitter is meeting an ultimate and deeply degrading demise. Well, I won’t mourn it. Twitter has had such a bad influence on news and journalism in this country that I’m convinced that the end of it can only be a social good.

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Tanya Sweeney Opinion J-Lo might think taking Ben Affleck's last name is romantic, I don’t and that's why I'm keeping mine

She’s been engaged six times and married four times, yet Jennifer Lopez clearly believes that this latest union, with actor Ben Affleck, is for keeps.

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Mary McCarthy Opinion Our bus services won’t improve unless we pay drivers properly and look after them

Dublin Bus and the Go-Ahead service are in the firing line over cancellations of buses. But in my experience bus drivers are generally legends, and I think we’re missing the crux of the problem: which is they should be paid more.

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Mitch Daniels Opinion Absurd fallacies can live on despite being disproved

The Piltdown Man hoax, a faked ‘missing link’ between humans and apes, escaped exposure for 41 years.

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Roslyn Dee Opinion Remembering the women whose loved ones never came home from war

At some stage tomorrow she will seep into my consciousness and linger there, this woman long dead, a woman I never met, but a woman who is not only part of who I am but is also forever linked to the day that’s in it.

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John Downing Opinion Repeated Northern Ireland election delays risk taking sheen off 25th anniversary of Good Friday Agreement

The old adage that “Northern Ireland has a problem for every solution” looks depressingly accurate.

Frank McGovern Opinion The pathway to limiting global warming is all about managing the earth’s energy balance

The run-up to COP27 was remarkably different to last year’s COP26 in Glasgow. COP26 received unprecedented media attention. The messaging was compelling and it engaged the public. A key focus was keeping 1.5C alive.

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Jennifer Rubin Opinion Trump is running out of steam and that’s why Biden should bow out of election race

Donald Trump is losing steam. Even his nicknames have gotten weaker.

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Sarah Caden Opinion Netflix nod to Diana may be a tilt too far

It’s possible that the only person who could really pull off the Diana head tilt was Princess Diana herself. The Crown season five doesn’t arrive on Netflix until Wednesday, but already we’ve seen plenty of actress Elizabeth Debicki tilting chin toward shoulder while casting eyes upward in imitation of the late Princess of Wales.

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John Downing Opinion Political will is there for breakthrough in protocol impasse, but goodwill for Tories and the DUP is quickly waning

It really could be “over by Christmas” – but then again, nobody seems to have told that to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

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Mary Kenny Opinion Population growth will provide the people to solve all these problems our planet faces

Next Tuesday, November 15, will be a milestone in our planet’s history: there will be an estimated eight billion people on Earth – the largest number ever.

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Jennifer Rubin Opinion Maga forces’ sowing of doubt in the mid-terms began before the counting even started

The polls may have closed, but don’t imagine we will have definitive results within hours or even days in the mid-term elections.

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Ian O'Doherty Opinion Why my lack of surprise at these disgusting revelations? Well, I’m a past pupil of Templeogue College

It just never stops, does it? The lies, the sexual abuse, the physical abuse, the intimidation, the mealy-mouthed and half-hearted apologies. Just when we think we’re out, we’re dragged back in.

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Sinead Ryan Opinion ‘Tampon-gate’ aside and even if it will be unsettling on many levels, I will be glued to The Crown

I don’t know what hour of the day it is by the time you get to reading this column.

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Tom Peck Opinion What our suffering planet absolutely does not need is Boris Johnson thinking he can save it

For a moment, back there, all of two weeks ago, it really did seem like the Tory party was going to return, dog-like to its own vomit (the vomit being Boris Johnson), and force the rest of us in Britain to eat it too.

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Caroline O’Doherty Opinion Taoiseach Micheál Martin expresses his horror at COP27 as radiation clouds, devastating drought and floods are all hard to swallow

Breakfast at Sharm El Sheikh yesterday was an unsettling affair.

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Catherine Conlon Opinion It turns out Ireland’s boasts over its ‘benign, sustainable farming’ may be a lot of hot air

Three key UN reports in the last month have warned that urgent and collective action is needed to avoid climate tipping points when it will no longer be possible to avoid climate breakdown. Professor Johan Rockstrom said that while geopolitical tensions were high, the world was coming “very, very close to irreversible changes… time is really running out very, very fast”.

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Mya-Rose Craig Opinion Lack of leadership since last climate summit leaves little hope for COP27

In September 2020, I travelled to the Arctic aboard a Greenpeace ship with scientists looking to find if the ice was at its thinnest in history. We found the ice to be at its second thinnest ever, only beaten by a year when the weather had caused it to be worse.

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Amanda Little Opinion From powdered egg to freeze-dried casseroles, America’s survival foods industry is thriving – and it’s not confined to paranoid radicals

In the first seven months of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic brought America to its knees, sales at survivalist supplier Augason Farms surged. The company couldn’t make its packages of long-storage comfort foods – powdered eggs and nut butters, freeze-dried stroganoffs, casseroles and lasagnes – fast enough.

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John Downing Opinion US mid-term vote and a possible return of The Donald looks like bad news for Ireland

D is for Democrat – and today D is also for dread. Joe Biden’s party looks set to lose its shaky majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives in mid-term elections as US voters go to the polls.

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Frank Coughlan Opinion In the first acid test of US sentiment since Capitol Hill riots, the devil is in the detail

The man scrolled the headlines on the front page of his newspaper, shook his head gravely and said – as much to himself as the girl behind the shop counter – that we live in interesting times.

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Fionnán Sheahan Opinion Balaclava slips with Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s ‘good murderers and bad murderers’ logic

Jockey our law. The automated subtitles on the live feed from the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis didn’t quite pick up on the nuances of the Irish language.

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John Daly Opinion Other Voices casts a warm glow into a cultural void at just the right time of the year

It comes calling with the darkness, slithering in the first week of November, like a menacing mob collector on an unpaid debt. As time rolls on, seasonal affective disorder (Sad) gets no easier to bear on this windswept isle – made worse this year by our EU neighbours continuing to bask in temperatures more akin to midsummer.

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Lorraine Courtney Opinion There’s no such thing as a free lunch – but it could make all the difference to school children

The lunchbox is probably the single item that destroys an any notions we might have of schools as egalitarian sanctuaries that protect children from the so-called real world.

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Naomi Nix Opinion It’s the US Supreme Court that may decide Twitter’s moderation course, not Elon Musk

It’s been a wild few days reporting on Elon Musk and Twitter. On October 27, the world’s richest man completed his acquisition of the social media company and immediately fired the firm’s CEO and three of its other top executives. Since then, Musk’s lieutenants have been at work inside the company, meeting with senior managers and drawing up layoff plans.