The town council of Ennis, County Clare, has voted to erect a memorial to the Irish people who died during the Vietnam War.

More than 40 years after dying while serving his country in the Vietnam war, Sergeant Steve Flaherty’s letters to his loved ones have been returned to his family in South Carolina. His letters, which had been used as propaganda in Vietnam during the war, were returned in exchange for a Vietnamese soldier’s diary.

Oliver Warnock, 72, a seriously ill, Irish-born decorated US army veteran, has one wish as he battles a spreading cancer -- that his two sons in Ireland become eligible to live with him in the US as his final fight unfolds.

The wheels seem to have come off Donald Trump's campaign for president this week.

Would-be Irish parents face a heartbreaking wait to see if they can still adopt their children after Russia put Ireland on an adoption blacklist.

The ties that bind father to daughter, nation to nation are on display in "Vietnam: Our Father Daughter Journey" by Ed and Zoeann Murphy. (Full disclosure: This columnist is proud to call the authors his cousins.) The book is a written as well as photographic journey through recent decades, covering the tumultuous events which led Murphy to Vietnam in the 1960s, protest back home in the 1970s, and then back to Vietnam as the past painfully began to recede. Ed provides much of the historical context, discussing his Irish Catholic Democratic upbringing in almost rural Staten Island, his flirtation with a life inside the church, and then his trip to Vietnam, where he helped wage war before coming home and fighting to end the conflict. Zoeann's photos capture the beauty and vitality which drew both of them back to this divided nation decades after the war had ended. Along the way, both reflect on war and peace, family and art.