Leo Varadkar on resignation, regret and repressing his identity: ‘Coming out was like emigrating’
The 46-year-old is enjoying retirement, even if becoming taoiseach was the pinnacle of an obsession he’d had with politics since he was seven
The jock, the nerd, the rebel, the princess and the freak: What kind of teenager were you?
From Ferris Bueller to Beverly Hills 90210 and The OC, teen dramas have helped turn us all back into adolescents
Michael D Higgins’s poetry album Against All Certainty: To hell with policy wonks for president, get a few bards
The President takes us back to an era of scarcity, warmth and unspoken love
The Traitors: My favourite character is Eamon, who is being radicalised before our eyes
My favourite character is Eamon the garda, who is being radicalised before our eyes
‘It was all about hurling... Being gay, ultimately, you were not masculine enough’
Cofounder of the LGBTQ+ youth organisation Belong To discusses the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric across the world
The challenges of creating the new Irish dictionary: ‘There was no word for avocado’
Patrick Freyne speaks to the chief editor of the new monolingual Irish dictionary, due to launch in October
Patrick Freyne: Real Housewives of London shows what happens when you try to abolish shame
The real star of the show is a sanity-troubled canine companion to the owner of the longest legs in Belgravia
160,000 mod-haired Oasis fans make for Croke Park
The Britpop band’s greatest creation was the Oasis fan
Tubs in a topper, RTÉ on its uppers: Patrick Freyne can see clearly now
Ryan Tubridy’s return of €150,000 to his old employer, plus eight other TV moments I missed while I was away reading books and smelling flowers
‘On which dating show did your parents meet?’ is a classic 2025 icebreaker
On E4’s The Honesty Box, a bunch of hunks and hunkettes must obey the whims of a glowing red cube. Would that life were so simple for the rest of us!
‘There were four girls raped in front of us. Their mother cried for their safety’
Rape and sexual assault are used as weapons of war in Sudan. A refuge in Adre in Chad offers ‘a safe space for women and girls’ where they can make handicrafts and talk
Returning home from Chad, I feel there’s a glitch in western empathy
The Sudan war is the world’s biggest humanitarian disaster, but it seems our human compassion is taken up by other conflicts
The nine biggest TV shows of 2025 so far: Why you should watch them, and where you can catch them
Including Andor, Severance, The Last of Us, Your Friends & Neighbors, and Adolescence
Sudanese refugees in Chad: ‘I still hear the sound of shooting in my ears’
Having escaped a war where murder and rape seem systematic, some 1.3 million people from Sudan struggle to meet their daily needs in Chad - while bearing physical and emotional scars
‘My son was killed in front of my eyes. Three bullets in his chest’: Patrick Freyne in Chad’s desert camps
An unforgiving conflict between rival military factions has killed 150,000 people. Another 12 million people are displaced, many fleeing to a huge desert camp in eastern Chad. Photographs by Chris Maddaloni