Funeral of John O’Neill told he was a man with ‘big heart and an open mind’

Son tells mourners he has lost ‘a great father’ who had been ‘deeply rooted in north Clare’

‘Winging it’ when you are making a speech involves lots of practice

Pilita Clark: few speakers truly have the ‘wang’ to wing it

Breda O’Brien: Empathy for refugees lasted no longer than a like or retweet

Sub-contracting responsibility for refugees to Ankara sees refugees as a threat to be kept out, not human beings in need of shelter

Jim Crace wins IMPAC award for outstanding Harvest

Novel is terrific and tells story of rural community faced with the coming of enclosure

VE Day: Joy in Europe, but worse horrors of WWII were yet to come

Eileen Battersby: Europe’s streets lined with people too exhausted by six years of grief

Colum McCann is only Irish writer on Impac shortlist

Themes of war and real life dominate Dublin Literary Award shortlist

Eileen Battersby’s favourite Australian fiction

To mark Australia Day, our Literary Correspondent celebrates her literary wizards of Oz

Shane Hegarty’s cultural highs and lows of 2014

'Last Week Tonight with John Oliver' was great comedy - and journalism

Richard Flanagan: war, the Booker and a life more circular

The Tasmanian’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about Australian POWs doomed to build the Burma Death Railway, is the first great work to win the Booker since 2001

Literary wizards of Australia and New Zealand

With the Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan announced as this year’s Booker winner, we bring you 10 great novels from Down Under

What Bono can learn from the Booker winner

The U2 singer’s iTunes apology had parallels with Richard Flanagan’s speech, but each came from a very different place

Man Booker Prize 2014: Richard Flanagan wins

‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ is a powerful and sometimes brutal love story

Booker shortlist: potential showdown between two of the year’s finest novels

British and US authors dominate Man Booker shortlist

No Irish authors make the cut but two US writers feature for the first time