Hey ladies, reckon your gaze holds a particular, indefinable “truth in your eyes”? If so, you may just be the next Rose of Tralee and winner of a five-day festival seeking the sweetest ‘Rose’ based on her intellect, ambitions and aspirations. And those truthful eyes? Well, they’re taken from the 19th century song The Rose [...]

Sean Grant – half of the comedy duo behind the Coasters film – reveals the trials of being professionally funny on an island of comedians. “So you’re a comedy writer are you? And what makes you so funny?” Now I’m used to awkward questions  such as, “How did you get this number?” and “Were you [...]

While it’s true that most of our visitors wing it over here by air, there is another option for reaching our shores – the super-modern, über-comfortable ferry! Ferry routes are zipping millions of passengers a year between the ports of Ireland and the UK and Europe. Now, obviously, the ferry is not going to beat [...]

The first rays of the morning illuminate the tent, the morning breeze rustles the trees, the smell of grass and bark fill your nostrils and you share your first glimpse of the day with the squirrel hopping past. Ireland makes some bedfellow to wake up with finds Julie Basque. There’s a reason they call the [...]

One of Ireland’s leading landscape photographers Chris Hill reveals how he captured the breathtaking image that was to become the cover for his latest book. And don’t you know, it just had to be in the wonderful West of Ireland… In June 2006, myself and my very good friend Colin McCadden set out in a [...]

Knives, forks, spoons…baking cutters. Tuck into Northern Ireland’s fascinating food! I’m sitting down at 8.30am in Belfast and having a ‘when in Rome, eat how the locals eat’ moment. “If there’s a breakfast of champions,” my server advises “it has to be the Ulster Fry”. That’s fried bacon, eggs, tomato, potato bread and soda farls. [...]

Scuba divers are some of the keenest travellers on the planet, because for them there are two worlds to explore: above and below the waves. And because we’re an island, Ireland has so much more scope for discovering the weird and the wonderful below the shoreline! Flipper-footed explorers from around the world come to Ireland [...]

There are even some spots of Ireland that this local hasn’t experienced…just yet!