Page 7 - John Downing News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Even in a time of war, the day-to-day business of living must somehow continue – and that includes burying the dead.

Ursula von der Leyen lives “over the shop” in a small EU-adapted apartment on the 13th floor of the commission HQ, close to her offices. It allows her to devote her time to steering things across 27 member states, which amount to 450 million people.

Three weeks from now, on March 8, Irish voters will be asked to vote on two very important constitutional changes – changes so important that most people say they know “hardly anything” about them.

My grandfather, Tom Downing, was abducted and murdered by the IRA in Cork city back in the violent days of late November 1920, and his body has never been recovered to this day. His story has lain idle for a century, and was unsurprisingly a family taboo in the uber-nationalist decades which followed, when retrospectively everyone had been “out fighting the Tans”.

Tributes have been paid to journalist, author, broadcaster, and Radio Kerry contributor Michael O’Regan, who has passed away.