The Latest Breaking News from Ireland

Irish writer Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning fifth novel is a timely and urgent book described as powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real, capturing the social and political anxieties of our time. The book is set in a dystopian Dublin in the grips of totalitarianism. Some of the themes of "Prophet Song"…

Leo Varadkar said an ‘an innocent child who was lost has now been found’ after Hamas released nine-year-old Irish-Israeli hostage Emily Hand.

Irish author Paul Lynch won the 2023 Booker Prize for fiction on Sunday for his novel "Prophet Song," a dystopian work about an Ireland that descends into tyranny.

Six books, three authors called Paul, one £50,000 prize. In the end, Paul Lynch has taken the spoils for his dystopian tale of a totalitarian Ireland – but it doesn’t feel like a winner that will stand the test of time, writes our chief book critic Martin Chilton

The Irish novelist won for his fifth book

Prophet Song imagines an Ireland under fascist control, breaking through the it-couldn’t-happen-here complacency of western societies

Up to 500 people looted shops, set fire to vehicles and threw rocks at crowd control officers. The violence was sparked by rumors that a foreign national was responsible for a knife attack outside a Dublin school.

The former aide to Tony Blair said there was ‘an arrogance about the current government in its attitudes to Ireland’.

Emily Hand had been held captive by Hamas since the October 7 attacks in Israel.