Authentic Ireland or the tourist haunts? Every year more and more discerning travelers to Ireland are opting to visit the real country, rather than just climbing aboard the endless bus trails with the tourist hordes and never actually meeting a local.

Lacking in Halloween costume ideas and want to impress your Irish friends? Well look no further than IrishCentral’s Irish Halloween costume guide!

Planning a trip to Dublin but strapped for cash? There’s no end to the free fun to be had all over the nation’s capital with museums, visitors centers, scenic attractions and tourists trails.

Ireland is fast becoming the country with a thousand welcomes for the gay and lesbian community. Here are 10 interesting tit bits about gay Ireland.

Tony-winning Irish actor Jim Norton has returned to Broadway in Finian’s Rainbow, a joyful big-budget revival of a golden-era classic that’s become that rare thing: an almost critic-proof Broadway musical. Cahir O'Coherty talks to the veteran Irish actor and his A-list Broadway castmates about starring in the most hotly-anticipated show of the season.

Welcome to Ireland’s revitalized North and Northwest! Even the hip Lonely Planet Bluelist proclaims Northern Ireland as the hot new destination, and cites Belfast as one of the top cities on the rise.

Featuring award winning Irish playwrights like Sebastian Barry, Billy Roche and Conor McPherson, the 1st Irish Theatre Festival is putting new Irish writing on the map in Manhattan. Sebastian Barry and Vincent Dowling talk about the exciting month long event, already attracting critical raves.

Up and coming English actor Ben Barnes has said that he hopes his career will be as successful as Colin Farrell’s. The star of the new film “Dorian Gray” said that both he and the famous Irish actor started their careers with less-than-desirable jobs, which is why he looks to Farrell for inspiration.

Irish-American actor John Cusack recently took a three-week vacation to Ireland to celebrate his mom’s 80th birthday, and luckily for his fans, he Tweeted his thoughts and pictures along the way.

The Irish are famed for many things -- for their writers, their music, their hospitality, and even for their whiskey. But what about for love?

With video: In news that may come as a shock to few, but not to anyone who has given the matter any serious thought, the Blarney Stone in County Cork has been named the world’s germiest tourist attraction.

This month, in an exhibition that seems calculated to attract every Oscar Wilde enthusiast in America, the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan will exhibit a selection of the Irish writer’s most important manuscripts and letters. But this isn’t just another stuffy museum piece featuring a more than usually compelling Irish writer. This time the Morgan can boast of a dramatic first: the whereabouts of this beautifully bound collection was unknown to scholars for over half a century.

The Irish Repertory Theatre has the stamina and artistic daring to bring us the "Yeats Project," a month-long festival of all 26 rarely performed plays written by Ireland’s greatest poet, William Butler Yeats.

  Oscar winner Jeremy Irons’ voice, which is famously rich and resonant, is known to every child in America who’s grown up in the past 15 years as the shake-in-your-shoes voice of Scar, in Disney’s "The Lion King" But

If you're an expectant parent looking for an Irish name, or you just want to figure out what your own means, you've come to the right place. We've done all the hard work of gathering the top Irish names in America into one place. All you have to do is sit back and choose one, or two...

In 1959, when she was 13, Carole O'Malley Gaunt's father asked her to stay at home and let the priest in, while he drove away to do errands with her seven brothers in the family car. He neglected to inform her that the priest was coming to administer Last Rites to her dying mother. This was, after all, a comfortable middle class Irish American home in the buttoned down era of the 1950s, when no one openly discussed thorny subjects like a mother's cancer or a father's burgeoning alcoholism.

The Devil's Disciple Starring Darcy Pulliam, Lorenzo Pisoni

At the Irish Repertory Theatre, New York

IT'S been quite a week for the devil. Between the plays of George Bernard Shaw and Conor McPherson, Old Nick's been getting around lately.

The devil in Shaw's play The Devil's Disciple, now playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, is actually a dashing young man with a fearful reputation, and not the red tailed demon come to claim another hapless soul, there's no doubt which play is the more satisfying.

AS the Irish Repertory Theatre's most artistically successful season to date draws to a close, artistic director Charlotte Moore and producing director Ciaran O'Reilly won't be basking in all the well-deserved accolades. The final play of the Rep's season opens this week, and plans are already afoot to host their 20th anniversary celebration with cocktails, dinner and entertainment at the Pierre Hotel on June 9.

"Because its our 20th anniversary we're bringing a lot of our company members back to perform pieces from some of the hit shows we've had," says O'Reilly.

Prisoner of the Crown

The Irish Repertory Theatre

RICHARD F. Stockton's Prisoner of the Crown, currently playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre, begins in 1916 at the height of the British Empire, when Ireland, her oldest and most troublesome colony, makes a startling bid for independence.

History reminds us that bid was brutally crushed by the British government, which feared permitting Home Rule would start a chain reaction that would spell the end for the Empire.

In A Very British Gangster Irish director Donal MacIntyre grants us an all access pass into the Noonan crime dynasty, a second-generation family of Irish stock. For the first time ever, a gang of contemporary criminals have opened their lives to the cameras to reveal the trials and tribulations of their leader Dominic Noonan, as he lurches from one criminal trial to the next. CAHIR O'DOHERTY talks to the film's Dublin-born director.

FASHION can be acquired, but style is something you're born with. Simon Doonan knows all about it. Now a sprightly 55-year-old at the top of his game, he is - he says - a man who is lucky enough to be doing what he loves.

This week New York's first ever Irish theater festival will take to the stage, featuring nine exciting new plays by Ireland's most celebrated playwrights. CAHIR O'DOHERTY talks to the festival's artistic director George Heslin about how and why he made this extraordinary new festival happen.

THIS weekend New York's first ever Irish theater festival, called 1st Irish 2008, will begin at the Theaters.

There is no shortage of Oscar Wilde biographies out there. And, at this point, it would seem difficult to suggest that there are any "secrets" left to tell about the always-controversial Irish-born writer of plays, poetry, novels and more. But Neil McKenna seems to have broken new ground in his acclaimed new book "The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde.

IRISH actress Fionnula Flanagan has pulled out of this year's US-Ireland Alliance pre-Oscar awards party in a dispute over the undocumented Irish in the U.S. Flanagan cited an opinion piece written by the organization's president, Trina Vargo, in The Irish Times in November which criticized the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR) and its efforts to legalize the Irish in the U.

NEW York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and author and journalist Pete Hamill have been selected as dual grand marshals by the Sunnyside Woodside St. Patrick's Day Parade Committee. The "all-inclusive" parade steps off at 43rd Street and Skillman in Sunnyside on Sunday, March 2 at 2 p.

Famous Irish American stand up comedian George Carlin died on Sunday June 22. T.J.

A Wilde Hotel in London

The Cadogan Hotel, a beautiful townhouse off London's Sloane Square, weaves contemporary styling with classic Edwardian decadence - and has an Irish connection to boot.

The Irish are travel birds. There's probably not a spot on the globe where they haven't touched down and built a nest or two.

NYC's First Irish Theater Fest

It's the biggest thing to ever hit the Irish theater scene in New York, the first ever Irish theater festival held throughout the month of September at the prestigious 59 East 59th Street Theatre in Manhattan, an unprecedented rollout for such a fledgling festival.

Called "1st Irish," it's the brainchild of Irish actor and director George Heslin, 36, whose Origin Theatre Company has introduced the works of over 26 new European - most of them Irish - writers to America since 2002. With admirable nerve, Heslin has programmed the entire festival as though it's been running for years, and in the process he's attracted many of the biggest names in contemporary Irish theatre.