THE 20th Friends of Sinn Féin (USA) fund-raising dinner was attended by 700 people in New York in November where the guests of honour were TDs Mary Lou McDonald and Gerry Adams, who was on a speaking tour that included Canada. Free article

ON 9 NOVEMBER, the Catalan Parliament voted to support a pro-independence proposal outlining a road map towards independence. Free article

THE headlong rush towards hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) in Ireland seems to have a momentum of its own even though the vast majority of TDs and ministers I have spoken with in Leinster House feel that fracking should never and will never be allowed on this small, beautiful island. Free article

THE IRISH PEOPLE are rightly angry about the collapse of the economy – brought about by Fianna Fáil’s blind belief that the market would come right in the end – and by the unnecessary austerity imposed on the working people by Fine Gael and Labour so that the Europe and the banks could be bailed out Premium service article

THE Fatah International Relations Committee representative to Ireland and Britain spent two days in Ireland in mid-November, holding extensive talks with Sinn Féin in Belfast and Dublin before meeting the Irish Labour Party in Dublin. Free article

IT IS IRONIC that the revelations involving such an important British agent as Brian Nelson should come in a Sunday newspaper the weekend that the British Government conclusively reneged on the commitments arrived at during last year’s Stormont House talks when the architecture for the disclosure of information for the families of people killed in the conflict was agreed. Premium service article

BOOK REVIEW: Their Prisons, Our Stories. Fáilte Cluain Eois Free article

FINE GAEL AND LABOUR continued their policy of eroding Irish neutrality as Taoiseach Enda Kenny announced that he was willing to deploy extra Irish troops to Mali in order to ‘free-up’ French forces following the horrific gun and bomb attacks by the so-called Islamic State in Paris which killed 130 people on 13 November. Premium service article

THE death has occurred of Una Sloan (née Kane) of Ballyboden, Dublin, a committed republican activist and a former Sinn Féin candidate who passed away at a tragically young age at St Vincent’s Hospital on 16 November. Free article