The Irish rock band's lead singer, Bono, has become the frontman for a worldwide campaign to cancel the debts of poor countries.

ECONOMIST: Inviting China to dinner

Whatever one may think of the songs, the world-wide success of Irish rock bands is a strange and wonderful phenomenon, made stranger still by the anti-poverty evangelism so vigorously pushed by Bob Geldof and his more popular imitator, Bono.

ECONOMIST: Ireland

Listen to Becoming a Jackal, the debut album by the Irish folk-rock band Villagers, and it's hard to believe it's the work of just one guy.

NPR: First Listen: Villagers, 'Becoming A Jackal'

Also on Saturday's bill at the National Stadium, Jim Rock claimed the vacant Irish middleweight title with a seventh-round stoppage of Slough-based Kevin Phelan.

BBC: SPORT | Boxing | Dunne maintains unbeaten record

And very much like "The Commitments, " this remarkable new Irish film grounds its Guy and Girl in the rock-solid specifics of musicianship.

WSJ: Film Review

Rock of Gibraltar had already taken the English and Irish 2000 Guineas and the St James's St Palace Stakes in three starts this season.

BBC: Gibraltar wins the Sussex

But Kinane claimed two Group One wins at Royal Ascot with Rock of Gibraltar and Sophisticat and then landed another Irish Derby success with High Chaparral.

BBC: Mick Kinane

That said, for five years now I have kicked off the New Year by taking a plunge in the icy waters of New York's Coney Island, a tradition I was introduced to while living in Dublin, where I joined hundreds of locals who make an annual Christmas leap from a rock at Sandycove and baptize themselves in the freezing Irish Sea.

BBC: This is Snow & Skiing week

You can play mini-golf at the bar-cum-games hall H Street Country Club, grab a pastrami on rye and a Guinness at the kosher deli-cum-Irish pub Star and Shamrock, or take in a show at the burlesque-cum-punk rock venue Red Palace.

BBC: The new neighbourhoods of Washington DC