The Irish Dental Association has estimated that, over the longer term, public spending on dental care for PRSI and medical card patients declined by about €800 million between 2009 and 2023.
Sir, – It seems that mandatory hi-vis clothing for pedestrians, cyclists and, even more bizarrely, motorcyclists is now firmly established as the latest road safety panacea on The IrishTimesLetters page.
Irish myth has been a pic’n’mix for fantasy for decades but myth is a product of culture and history ...Maybe the Irish Times offices should be next? You’ve written several works in the Doctor Who universe.
Possessions. A Memoir of Transformation in an Era of Precarity. Author. 9780715656044. Publisher. £14.99 ... Why fictionalise when the truth alone is so necessary?. Such a caveat makes it hard to take the book, and the issues raised within, seriously ... .
As we move into 2026, the wine world is changing rapidly. In Ireland and worldwide, consumption continues to fall, as people drink less or switch to alternative beverages ...John Wilson’s January wine quiz ... I have written about Irish wine before.
In discussing Yeats’s lines, “I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,/ I sought it daily for six weeks or so”, Vendler notes parenthetically, “Mention of that poem in his letters of the time prove this no exaggeration.
The Brimming World. Selected Essays 1975-2014. Author. 9781917371179. Publisher. €20 ... He connects this directly to his own childhood, reared bilingually in Belfast in the early 1950s, with Irish spoken exclusively at home ... READ MORE. Author Dave Rudden ... .
Departure(s). Author. 9781787335721. Publisher. €22.99 ... He meets Stephen and Jean at university and then their lives intersect again roughly 40 years later.READ MORE ... He promises to tell us the rest of Stephen and Jean’s story another time but he won’t ... .
Pulse. Author. 978-1783782772. Publisher. £14.99. Cynan Jones allows his readers little opportunity to breathe. His compulsive narratives are relentless, sweeping you along thrillingly in propulsive short paragraphs ...Just so ... Departures by Julian Barnes ... .
They say business has fallen by as much as 20 per cent in some cases at a time when business costs are rising sharply, with higher wage bills and new pension charges ... The area has seen significant redevelopment in recent times.
If predictions about people spending less time on their smartphones comes to pass, older-style time pieces such as alarm clocks and watches may well come back into vogue.
Its report on the last three months of 2025 shows that 16,184 homes were sold in that time, which represented an 8 per cent decline. Dublin topped the charts at 4,948 sales, followed by Cork (1,867) and Kildare (1,031) ... READ MORE ... .
For an Irish readership, Kelly’s argument has particular resonance ... For the Irish left in particular, Kelly’s argument should be sobering ... For Irish readers, Sleat’s insistence on multiple causality and historical nuance resonates.
Workhorse. Author. 978-0-00-873220-2. Publisher ... That she’s Irish-American Catholic, “an obvious mick with my blue eyes, shapeless legs”, makes her, in these WASPish halls, almost as much of a diversity hire as the occasional “Black British person” ... .