RTÉ News Now is a 24-hour news television network in the Republic of Ireland operated by Irish public service broadcaster RTÉ. The channel launched as RTÉ News Now available exclusively online on June 12, 2008. The channel began broadcasting as a free-to-air channel on October 29, 2010 on Saorview.

The channel broadcasts free-to-air and commercial free. The channel is available in Ireland and globally online, on mobile phones and an iPhone/iPad application is also widely available free. The channel is operated by RTÉ's department RTÉ News and Current Affairs. The channel broadcasts in the Irish, English and ISL languages.

RTÉ News Now was originally available only to online users of the RTÉ website and on mobile phones when the channel launched on June 12, 2008. Availability of the channel improved during test trials of Saorview in December 2009. The channel has been made available since May 2010 on train services within Dublin city and surrounding regions under a special agreement between CIE and RTÉ. Previously, Sky News provided such a service. Since October 29, 2010 the channel is available free-to-air to 98% of homes throughout the Republic of Ireland through Saorview. Upon the announcement in February 2011 that RTÉ News Now would become a permanent fixture to the Saorview line-up a number of media organizations criticized such a move claiming RTÉ would continue to have a monopoly over news output within Ireland.

RTÉ News and Current Affairs (Irish: Nuacht agus Cúrsaí Reatha RTÉ), is a major division of Raidió Teilifís Éireann responsible for news programming on television, radio and online within the Republic of Ireland. It is, by far, the largest and most popular news source in Ireland - with 77% of the Irish public regarding it as their main source of both Irish and international news. It broadcasts in English, Irish and Irish Sign Language.

On January 1, 1926, 2RN started broadcasting. It was Ireland's first radio station. On May 24, 1926, there was the first advertised news bulletin on 2RN. Then on February 26, 1927, the first ever daily news report was broadcast on the station.

During the Second World War, referred to in Ireland as The Emergency, because of the Emergency Powers Act 1939, media censorship of radio broadcasts effected news bulletins. Before all news bulletins were broadcast, the scripts of the bulletins were read over the phone to Head of the Government Information Bureau, Frank Gallagher. Censorship brought in under the Act was lifted on May 11, 1945.

Seamus Heaney (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; born 13 April 1939) is an Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge, he now resides in Dublin.

As well as the Nobel Prize in Literature, Heaney has received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). He has been a member of Aosdána since its foundation and has been Saoi since 1997. He was both the Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry and was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996. Heaney's personal papers are held by the National Library of Ireland.

Robert Lowell called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats" and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have echoed the sentiment that he is "the greatest poet of our age".

<poem> From Mid-Term Break

Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple, He lay in the four foot box as in a cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.