After years of lobbying that the bulk of funds available for income tax cuts should go the low paid, it seems that the corridors of power are suddenly listening. PD leader and Enterprise, Trade and Employment minister Mary Harney declared this week that there will be no tax cuts in the 42% rate of income tax. Free article

Two further Turkish death fasters have succumbed in the past week. Hunger-striking prisoner Ibrahim Erler died after 132 days of hunger strike. Free article

Brian Campbell, co-writer with Laurence McKeown of H3, tells why it is so important that their film has finally made it to the screen Free article

John Boyle O'Reilly was some character. Shipped to Australia for his Fenian activites, he escaped and sailed to the more hospitable shores of Amerikay only to return seven years later to rescue another boatload of political prisoners and once again set off for the US. Free article

Well it took 68 minutes for `The fields of Athenry' to start up in my local, but start up it did and by the final whistle it was Sam, and not Michael, who was being taken away. Free article

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Irish republicanism was searching for a political way forward. The republican movement had split again with the formation of de Valera's Fianna Fáil, which began attracting widespread support among ordinary people who opposed the Free State regime. The abstentionist Sinn Féin had grown ineffective and increasingly irrelevant and its relationship with the IRA had become tenuous. Free article

THE NUMBER of Blanket men on Hunger Strike in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh has been re-established at eight for the first time since Friday 31 July, with 24-year-old Jim Devine from Strabane joining the fast from last Monday. Free article