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The remnants of a bronze age tomb once thought to have been destroyed and lost to history have been discovered in County Kerry on the Atlantic coast of Ireland.The tomb, known locally as Altóir na Gréine – the sun altar – stood for approximately 4,000 years on a hill outside the village of Ballyferriter on the Dingle peninsula before vanishing in the mid-19th century...Georgiana Chatterton, an English aristocrat and traveller, had visited the site and sketched the monument in 1838, but 14 years later an antiquarian named Richard Hitchcock reported that it had been broken up and carried away, presumably...

Could Cardinal Joseph Tobin be the first Irish-American pope?The choice of Cardinal Joseph Tobin of New Jersey to the key Vatican Congregation of Bishops committee which is responsible for selecting bishops all over the world is a clear sign that Pope Francis may have greater things in store for the Irish American cardinal.Indeed, like as there was with Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley during the last papal election, the notion of Tobin becoming a strong candidate to succeed Francis as pope is clearly seen as a possibility.The pope and Tobin are very close having first met at a 2005 Synod on...

While the Irish island of Little Skellig was long thought to have been inhabited by nothing but a variety of seabirds, a new archaeological discovery demonstrates that monastics once labored in asceticism on the inaccessible crag. The archaeologist Michael Gibbons and a group of climbers recently located the remains of an early Christian church located on a narrow precipice overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, reports Afloat. Gibbons estimates that the church dates to the late 7th-early 8th century, when there was already a functioning monastery on nearby Skellig Michael. He described the location, 8 miles west of the Iveragh Peninsula...

An anti-Islamic group founded in Germany, which it emerges now has an Irish branch, is objecting to the building of a mosque in Tralee, County Kerry. The group denies it is racist, but says it wants to save Ireland from Islam. It is to launch a political party shortly. Kerry is the rural county with the biggest population of Muslims outside the main cities, such as Cork and Dublin. Killarney already has an Islamic cultural center. However, it has no full mosque. The second attempt in recent years to construct a mosque in Tralee on a large site is now...