The University of Limerick’s Regional Writing Centre is holding its fourth annual national essay-writing competition for 4th, 5th and 6th-year pupils. What’s required is an 800-1000 word essay on the following: “Despite her youth, Malala Youssafzai has already fought for several years for the right of girls to education, and has shown by example that children and young people, too, can contribute to improving their own situations.” In response, one must make reference to the role that young people play in Irish society today. Deadline for entries is Friday, February 27th 2015. Prizes will be announced on Tuesday, 27th May, 2015. For further information, go to...

Carl Gustaf Mannerheim was a Finnish national hero, and is credited with saving Finland from the USSR during the Winter War. This wasn’t the first war the USSR had managed to screw up; in the years immediately after the October Revolution they fought Poland. Poland at the time was led by the dictator Pilsudski. Pilsudski became the most powerful Pole since before the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned in 1795 between Russia, Prussia and Austria. The imperial capital of Austria was Vienna, a city known for its role in the history of music. It was here where Mozart finished his life. His life, however, was more successful in his home city of Salzburg, a city on the Austrian-German border. Germany borders a total of nine countries, including France and the Netherlands. These two nations share a land border as well, short as it is, on the island of Saint Martin in the Caribbean Sea. The islands of the Caribbean have all at one time or the other been ruled by a European country, and this includes part of the Virgin Islands. Though now ruled by the US, they were purchased by the emerging superpower from the unsuspecting kingdom of Denmark. Denmark is a Scandinavian country, and its history is closely intertwined with that of Norway and Sweden. Sweden was once considered a European superpower, though this was back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its legacy can be primarily observed by looking at the Åland Islands. These are Swedish-speaking islands in the Gulf of Bothnia. However, after the First World War they were forcibly given to a newly-independent Finland, who in her infant years of statehood, which also involved a bloody civil war, was led by the field marshal Carl Gustaf...