When online bookselling began to dominate the market in the early 2000s, many were predicting that the bookshop would simply die away. Now, however, Irish independent book shops are not only managing to survive. In fact, they are flourishing. Ahead of Independent Book Shop week, we spoke to several independent booksellers on how they’re surviving in the Amazon age, how they differentiate themselves and the joys of a good book.

As Britain woke on Friday morning to discover that Theresa May had flushed her Commons majority down the drain, people found themselves having to learn about an unfamiliar party on which May, or her successor, would be relying to get anything done…By Daniel Finn.

A mosque in Limerick received verses from the Quran wrapped in slices of bacon in the post. One imam said he fears further reprisals against the Muslim community, following acts of vandalism at other mosques in Limerick and in Galway. The mosque in question also received several “very offensive items” sent in the post, including images of the Prophet Mohammad, with a bomb in his turban.

A rare white lobster has been caught off the coast of Achill Island and given a new home in the local aquarium - shortly after a beach on the island reappeared after 33 years. The 'one-in-a-million' albino crustacean was caught by local fisherman Charlie O'Malley. Speaking to the Mayo News, he said: "I was hauling in a string of pots, and up came a white lobster, and I knew it was an unusual find because I have been fishing for the last 25 years. I’ve heard of them but never actually seen one of them before."

Back in 1984, violent storms in northwest Ireland did the unthinkable - together, they stripped an entire beach away from the coast, leaving locals with nothing but bare, grey rock pools where fun goes to die. But sometimes nature gives us a break, because a freak tide has appeared off the coast of Achill Island to dump hundreds of tonnes of sand back on the rocks, building up the beach that disappeared more than three decades ago.

Researchers in AMBER, the Science Foundation Ireland-funded materials science research centre hosted in Trinity College Dublin, have fabricated printed transistors consisting entirely of 2-dimensional nanomaterials for the first time. These 2D materials combine exciting electronic properties with the potential for low-cost production. This breakthrough could unlock the potential for applications such as food packaging that displays a digital countdown to warn you of spoiling, wine labels that alert you when your white wine is at its optimum temperature, or even a window pane that shows the day's forecast.

In the last few days, the Government has begun rolling out increases in social welfare payments for 1.3 million people. Payments, like the pension and the dole, are going up by €5 a week, in what will cost €301m. Increases for pensioners are justified on the basis that they have lived through periods of hyper inflation, punishing income tax rates and sky-high mortgage interest rates. It will help them to live with dignity and independence.

The dogged effort of a determined historian in a small Irish town uncovered one of the greatest tragedies in modern Irish history. By Tom Sykes.

Bill Donohue comments on news stories that Catholic nuns in Ireland housed a mass grave of babies: It was a lie in 2014 and it is a lie in 2017. There is no evidence of a mass grave outside a home for unmarried women operated by nuns in Tuam, Ireland, near Galway, in the 20th century. The hoax is now back again, and an obliging media are running with the story as if it were true.

IRELAND SHOULD GROW its seaweed sector to help weather the effects of Brexit on the food and drinks industry, a government committee has said. A report from the joint committee on agriculture, food and the marine singled out seaweed as an underdeveloped commodity that Ireland could use to “help mitigate some of the damage” caused by a hard Brexit. “Seaweed represents an opportunity for diversification of Irish aquaculture output,” the report said.

Tesco Ireland saw sales across its store network fall significantly after picket lines were placed outside a small number of its shops. The dispute centred around proposed contract changes to about 250 long-serving staff. The Mandate trade union which represents staff employed by the retail giant called off its strike action on Friday night as Tesco agreed to put contract changes on hold to allow a new round of Labour Court talks take place.

Five social workers were each paid more than €370,000 to represent children in court - with one earning €307,000 in a single year.

At €4.5m, the Dublin arm of engineering giant Curtiss-Wright has landed the largest ever contract related to European Space Agency activities. Calling it a key achievement for an Irish-based operation “working at the cutting edge of space technologies”, John Halligan Minister for Training and Skills, TD, has lauded a new multimillion-euro contract secured by Curtiss-Wright. The company’s Ireland-based facility has been selected by Italy’s European Launch Vehicle (ELV) SpA to provide a telemetry data system for the European Space Agency (ESA)’s new Vega C Launcher System.

The Pat Finucane Centre in Derry has produced papers from 1972 which document four cases of the alleged “waterboarding” of people in Northern Ireland by the British army and RUC. One of the papers is the “secret” minutes of a meeting in November 1972, where the then Fianna Fáil taoiseach Jack Lynch raised concerns with British prime minister Edward Heath about an epileptic who was allegedly “waterboarded” by British soldiers - although the term was not in use at the time.

Apple has not fully paid the 13 billion euros ($13.9 billion) it owes to Ireland in illegal tax benefits even though the deadline has passed, the European Union's competition said on Tuesday. "Well the recovery is not done yet but we have been working with the Irish authorizes and we can see that they are moving forward to do the recovery of the unpaid taxes," EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said during a press conference in response to a question by CNBC.

As US president Donald Trump’s immigration ban comes under international criticism, President Michael D Higgins has warned democracy could be destroyed by racism and xenophobia. Mr Higgins told the diplomatic corps of the dangers of demagoguery which he suggested was “exploiting fears and ignorance in ways that could destroy democracy itself”. The President was addressing embassy officials from more than 60 countries at what is the traditional...

The Gadfly, an English-language book barely known in the West became a sensation behind the Iron Curtain, writes Benjamin Ramm.

Ireland has voted to be the world’s first country to fully divest public money from fossil fuels. The Irish Parliament passed the historic legislation in a 90 to 53 vote in favour of dropping coal, oil and gas investments from the €8bn (£6.8bn) Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, part of the Republic’s National Treasury Management Agency. The bill, introduced by Deputy Thomas Pringle, is likely to pass into law in the next few months after it is reviewed by the financial committee. 

Torture is sometimes “justified” and can work as an interrogation method, a senior Conservative MP has said. Former army officer Bob Stewart said he had been “kind of a torturer” when he was posted to Northern Ireland during The Troubles. It comes after US President Donald Trump used his first television interview since coming to office to indicate his support for waterboarding.

A PROPERTY management company in Dublin is renting a number of houses across the capital to up to 70 people at a time, with up to 15 people in some rooms, Independent.ie can reveal. The owner of two properties implicated said he leases the houses to the company and allows them "to do what they like with them", insisting "there’s no breach of regulations".