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Tanya Sweeney Opinion Saying goodbye to Henry Hippo felt like a big moment, another sad step away from more familiar times

The last place I ever expected to get a lump in the throat was in the queue of the local Ulster Bank, and yet there I was, fighting back tears. Closing my bank account has seemed just one more thing on the never-ending life admin list, sandwiched in between the car service and the recycling bank. Yet it turned out to be a surprisingly emotional moment. I stood at the counter of a very quiet branch, and told the bank teller that I was finally ready to cut up my cards, bring the balance down to zero (that didn’t take much effort, to be fair) and wave the bank goodbye. I had stood at these very bank counters since I was around 10 years old, and now I was doing it for the last time. Mmmmf, I said I wouldn’t cry…

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Martina Devlin Opinion Don’t be a waster – it’s not an option if we want to be serious about saving the planet

One scorching summer, when the tar melted across the seat of every pair of shorts I owned – my mother tried to remove it with butter, and issued a ban (ignored) against sitting on the ground – I dipped my toe into entrepreneurship.

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Liam Collins Opinion Alan Dukes’ comment on people from the Border reveals a particularly Fine Gael partitionist mentality

Former Fine Gael leader Alan Dukes has rather crudely evoked the Troubles to speculate that people living along the Border are “more easily” prone to violence, a tendency that is “in their blood”.

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Lauren Beehan Opinion Feel free to say ‘Christmas’ – it isn’t a banned word

Like clockwork, certain things appear at this time every year: turkeys in shops, piano ballads in television ads and variations of the argument that “we can’t say Christmas any more”.

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Emma Kelly Opinion Having a normal Christmas would be magical for me

How on earth is it December? There should be an inquiry into how November just didn’t happen this year – it was a month of growing unease about how warm it was and a few discounts on pumpkin-themed sweets, and now here we are.

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Ellen Coyne Opinion Matt Hancock’s I’m a Celeb stint showed the public what politicians are really like — tenaciously, unnaturally self-interested

As regular readers will know, I adore reality TV and need little to no excuse to add yet another series to my treasured, burgeoning collection. So when Matt Hancock absented himself from his constituents, with the same apparent ease with which he absented himself from his wife, I dutifully set I’m A Celebrity to series link and started following the show with studied devotion.

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John Downing Opinion ‘Dog whistle’ politics or just echoing people’s views? Either way, we need to talk about our duty to help refugees

At the count centre in Ennistymon in February 2020, newly elected TD Cathal Crowe insisted that his boycott just weeks earlier, as mayor of Clare, of planned commemorations for Ireland’s first legitimate police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), had done his election effort “no harm at all”.

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Roslyn Dee Opinion Nothing evokes long-forgotten memories quite like hearing an old song does

One day last week I was a teenager again. The rewind lasted only a matter of minutes but there I was, dressed in my bottle-green school uniform and red tie and with my fair hair hanging just off my shoulders in two Hiawatha-style plaits. And I was singing – not just any old song but a very specific one that is particularly pertinent at this time of year. The music in question was actually a Christmas carol and that carol was Once in Royal David’s City.

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Tanya Sweeney Opinion Kylie Jenner has every right to keep her son’s name quiet, but isn’t it a bit late for the Kardashians to start being private?

Every time a Kardashian/Jenner progeny arrives into the world, there’s the semi-entertaining wait for exactly where on the ingenuity scale the new baby name will land.

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Gerard O’Regan Opinion Would Roy Keane the manager have sacked Roy Keane the player?

I MET Mick McCarthy a few times when he was guiding the destiny of our national team. Like his predecessor, Jack Charlton, there was something granite-like about him.

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Mary McCarthy Opinion We’ve never had a woman as Taoiseach – and it’s little wonder when you see the sexism that some female politicians face

It’s been a hundred years and we’ve never had a female Taoiseach – but when you see the nonsense those at the top in other countries have to face, it’s a wonder any go into politics at all.

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Mary Kenny Opinion Rejoice! At long last, the tiresome process of airport security is set to be overhauled

It was just a short city break to Copenhagen with my son, earlier this year. As we went through security at Gatwick, the operator took up my little plastic bag of permitted cosmetics, removing each mini-item, examining make-up, mini-shampoos, and tiny containers of cleansing rose-water with the forensic eye of a laboratory investigator looking for deadly toxins.

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Ian O'Doherty Opinion Christmas comes earlier each year, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all

Well, it’s that time of the year again. In fact, it seems to have been ‘that time of the year’ for the last few weeks.

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Jianli Yang Opinion Why we must not let China stage another Tiananmen

On October 13, just a few days before the start of the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th National Congress, a man staged a solo protest on an overpass in Beijing against President Xi Jinping and his draconian “zero Covid” policy. I’d hoped this hero’s actions would trigger a wave of peaceful protest to stop Xi from continuing to harm the Chinese people – even though my hopes were tempered by an awareness that the regime’s policies of intense repression have made protests rare and almost impossible to start. What has happened over the past week has exceeded all my expectations. First came the uprising by workers at a Foxconn factory complex protesting against dismal working conditions.

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John Downing Opinion As someone from an Irish Catholic background, I'm A Celebrity looked like Hancock’s trip to Lough Derg

It’s politics before showbiz, the former UK health minister, Matt Hancock, seems to be telling the world after coming third in that I’m a Celebrity piece of unreality jungle television hokum.

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Sinead Ryan Opinion I’m not dull or uninteresting, I love people – but the forced jollity of Christmas parties? No thanks

Christmas party. Surely the two most dreaded words to be heard as we head into December, especially when preceded by, “You are invited to the...”

‘It was cold, dirty and dilapidated with concrete floors – a Rottweiler was decomposing in the garden’ – nurse reveals battle to find a home

I was born and raised in south Dublin, going to school in Terenure before studying nursing in London, where I had a wonderful few years.

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David Von Drehle Opinion To infinity and beyond – but Nasa’s Artemis moon mission might reveal our true human limits

The last Apollo astronauts lifted away from the moon after a three-day campout in 1972. They couldn’t survive on the lunar surface long, so there had been little for them to do. Once they had collected rocks, driven a car, bounded like bunnies and smacked a golf ball, Nasa was left with a very exclusive ride to nowhere.

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Katja Hoyer Opinion Germany’s political mainstream continues to sleepwalk as support for a radical alternative grows

The curious case of Sahra Wagenknecht can tell you a lot about the current state of German politics. Polls rank her as the country’s most popular female leader. An intensely charismatic woman, the 53-year-old Wagenknecht grew up in East Germany.

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John Downing Opinion Don’t get ‘historied out’ of the centenary events – the most interesting bits are here

I have always felt Tuesday is an awful day and November is a terrible month. Today we are stuck with both – while also contemplating the move towards something eventually better, December and Christmas.

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Frank Coughlan Opinion Now that we tip into the festive season in November, Christmas is starting to feel like a real drag

I got a whiff of it over the weekend in Dublin city centre. Not so much the jingle of Christmas yet present, but of the season – though not yet properly attired – about to be paraded while miserable old November is still in attendance.

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Kirsty Blake Knox Opinion Matt Hancock didn’t get the comeuppance we dreamed of on I’m A Celebrity but it might not prove to be the PR win he thinks it is yet

When Matt Hancock entered the I’m A Celeb... jungle with a reported £400,000 paycheck, commentators, TV critics, and fellow Tory MPs were certain it was going to blow up in his face.

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John Daly Opinion At a dark time for Catholic Church, tale of the ‘Vatican Pimpernel’ reminds us of the good in the world

There was no place to hide from priestly persecution last week as the Spiritan scourge poured forth in dreadful detail from every media source. Were there no decent priests, we wondered as we wandered around Killarney on a winter mini-break? Then we encountered a bronze statue which eloquently answered that question across the mists of time.

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Fionnán Sheahan Opinion Elon Musk’s megalomania is halted by a Rebel with a cause in Sinéad McSweeney

Legend had it that Sinéad McSweeney so wowed Bertie Ahern with a three-minute assessment of his party’s problems at a Fianna Fáil dinner dance that the future Taoiseach hired her on the spot. Not quite. Mind you, the grapevine also wrongly had it that she was a relative of Terence MacSwiney, the martyr Lord Mayor of Cork, who died on hunger strike during the War of Independence. Sure, the rumoured association didn’t do her any harm in politics.

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Lorraine Courtney Opinion Gardaí will be armed at some point in the future, so what are we waiting for?

We cling to the fantasy that we can police Ireland without guns, that we can be one of the few countries in the world which doesn’t need an armed police force.

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Hamid Mir Opinion The army is back at the centre of Pakistan’s politics as Imran Khan stirs trouble in bid to secure elections

After months of intrigue, Pakistan finally has a new army chief. The job is going to Lt Gen Asim Munir, a former head of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the powerful military intelligence agency.

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Adrian Weckler Opinion Trade the toxicity of Twitter for Irish LinkedIn, where adversities are overcome and nothing cannot be silver-lininged

Need a break from Twitter’s drama? Come to LinkedIn! Say goodbye to toxicity and hello to positivity! And career synergy! And more life-crises-turned-brand-opportunities than you could hope for!

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Brendan O'Connor Opinion Somehow Roy Keane has become the moral compass of the world

We are precluded, for now, from discussing in depth the actual story of the week.

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Gene Kerrigan Opinion Hoodwinked by another nod to Old Pals’ Act (1923)

In a speech at the recent Fine Gael ard fheis, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar praised Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s “decency”. And sure, who’d take issue with that? These gentlemen have presided over significant damage done to many of the people of this country, but that’s a political failing, not a personal flaw.

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Fiona O'Connell Opinion Lay of the Land: Wrapping up as autumn bows out and the year winds down

This isn’t just the last Sunday of November but also autumn, as evident by all the bare branches. For the trees have taken a battering this month, with more or less back-to-back storms. The sun, on the days when it shines, is all too fleeting before that tell-tale smudge of grey starts spreading across the sky and the wind picks up again.