What happens when September turns warm in Mayo and every flying insect in Connacht decides to visit? Here I sit, dear readers, at my keyboard in the townland of Castlebar, as another winged fury passes by my well-attuned ear before slapping the ...

You can tell everything you need to know about a culture by what it keeps in the larder for emergencies. The French hoard tinned pâté. Americans stockpile granola bars. The British maintain a strategic reserve of digestive biscuits.

How a Mayo man became the architect of miracles in America's most unlikely frontier of medicine

It must be unspeakably devastating to learn of your mother's death through a WhatsApp message.

The thermometer outside my kitchen window read 28 degrees Celsius yesterday afternoon - a figure so preposterously alien to the natural order of things in County Mayo that I was compelled to rap the glass smartly with my knuckles, convinced the ...

The professional classes have always been rather good at inventing reasons to feel superior.

If you'd told me ten years ago that Ireland's next presidential contest might pit a man whose feet were insured for $57 million against another who was recently the subject of a civil rape case, I'd have assumed you'd been at the poitín.

Last Saturday week, while most world leaders might have been contemplating matters of international diplomacy or domestic policy, Donald Trump was instead composing a social media post threatening to strip someone of their American citizenship.

On Saturday, July 5th, 2025, in the quiet parish rectory of Cannobio, overlooking the serene waters of Lake Maggiore, Fr Matteo Balzano reached a conclusion that defies our understanding.

In the shadow of the round tower, where history whispers through the corridors of Turlough Park, a leather bag tells a story that would make the most hardened cynic pause for breath.

Louis Theroux has always possessed an uncanny talent for making monsters seem ordinary, but in his latest documentary, The Settlers, he encounters subjects who have already mastered that transformation themselves.

Science has a peculiar talent for arriving fashionably late to life's most obvious parties, armed with clipboards and statistical significance, ready to solemnly announce what the rest of us have known since we first crawled from our beds in search ...

A wet June has arrived with all the unwelcome punctuality of a tax demand, and with it the dawning realisation that 2025 might be remembered as the year when the West's collective chickens finally decided to come home to roost.

At 9:39pm on Tuesday, May 20th, while most of Ireland was settling down to the evening news, a Gulfstream jet touched down at Shannon carrying eight men who had become inconvenient to America.

As the rapids of Covid-19 fade into memory, is Ireland truly ready for the next deluge? Where do we stand on pandemic preparedness as an administration is still drying off from the last flood?There's something inherently Irish about our approach to ...

Are you as disturbed as I am watching democracy crumble from across the Atlantic? So intense are the ties between Ireland and the US, it is akin to witnessing an American relative's slow surrender to dementia through sporadic FaceTime calls - you ...

There's something intrinsically Jesuitical about Cardinal Robert Prevost's ascension to the papacy.

There was a time when the extended thumb was Ireland's most eloquent digit. A silent semaphore that spoke volumes about trust, community, and the casual choreography of our national transportation. Now, like Latin, it's a dead language.

There was a time not so long ago when the family dog slept in the yard, the cat prowled the hedgerows for mice, and neither would have known what to do with a birthday cake shaped like a bone.

The moment Jorge Mario Bergoglio stepped onto that balcony overlooking St Peter's Square in 2013, a thousand headlines were born. Here was the first Latin American pope, the first Jesuit pope, the first to choose the name Francis.