You know that moment at a dinner when someone's had too much wine and starts saying increasingly unhinged things, and everyone else develops a sudden fascination with their napkins? The decent thing would be to intervene, to gently suggest perhaps ...

So here's a thing. Apparently, I'm menopausal. Yes, me. Despite having never possessed the requisite plumbing for such an endeavour, I am now, according to medical fashion, experiencing my very own version of The Change.

You may recall the article of September 4th, with justifiable pride, outlining the stellar achievements of Ballina native Dr Patrick McNamara as one of the world's leading neonatologists, a pioneer in the field of neonatal hemodynamics in premature ...

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.

There is something intrinsically fascinating about observing grandparents with their grandchildren on family outings. These intergenerational tableaux reveal more about our cultural evolution than a thousand sociological papers.

On our emerald isle, where saints once walked and monasteries flourished like clover patches, the Catholic Church isn't dying - it's evolving.

In what can only be described as economic chest-thumping of Cro-Magnon proportions, US President Donald Trump has unleashed his latest fiscal cudgel upon the world.

In a world where opinions are cheap, and outrage sells like discount narcissism at a reality star's garage sale, another social media darling has fallen victim to that most modern of plagues: cancellation by digital pitchfork.

There's something terribly evasive about our relationship with ageing. We acknowledge it with the same stoicism we reserve for discussions about taxes, the weather, and the inevitable annual defeat of our Mayo football team.

There is something uncomfortably painful about watching someone try desperately to be liked.

There's something unmistakably nauseating about watching the well-fed, centrally heated citizens of the western world wring their sanitised hands over what they insist on calling "the refugee crisis". Crisis. . .

A peculiar malaise creeps across Ireland's digital landscape, manifesting in hunched shoulders and downcast eyes in the blue glow illuminating faces from Louth to Louisburgh.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was. . . 'Me at the zoo'.

All readers will be familiar with the Titanic, that grand vessel of hubris and tragedy. Its wreckage lies in dignified silence, a memorial to human folly and the price of unchecked ambition.

From my perch in Castlebar, contemplating the ravaged trees and fences of our home's perimeter post an epic storm, I am considering that most bourgeois of life's transitions: retirement.

From my perch in Mayo, watching America's latest political metamorphosis feels like observing a peculiar theatrical production where the intermission lasted precisely four years.

There's something deliciously perverse about writing an article on minimalism while seated at my magnificently cluttered desk, surrounded by books and folders that threaten to avalanche at any moment, empty coffee cups creating their own abstract ...

My dear readers, I hope you have survived the recent calamitous weather conditions, veering between the complementary glows of amber, yellow, orange, and the elusive but thrilling red.

May perpetual light shine upon  The faces of all who rest here. May the lives they lived  Unfold further in spirit.

In the depths of that winter night, when even the stones seemed to hold their breath in anticipation, the ancient grotto stood as a humble sentinel on the outskirts of Bethlehem with its weathered walls, carved by centuries of wind and rain, bearing ...

The winter wind swept across the Judean hills with a fierce determination, biting through clothing and carrying the acrid scent of wood smoke from distant campfires.

In the wake of Storm Darragh's furious assault on our Emerald Isle, thousands of households found themselves thrust into an involuntary experiment in time travel, catapulted back to an era before the digital umbilical cord tethered us to our ...

After months of waiting and expectation, the long-awaited sequel to Gladiator arrived at my local cinema. I was characteristically early, too early, enduring the 20 minutes of adverts by gorging on my supply of popcorn and coke.

In an age where we worship at the altar of precocious youth, where Mark Zuckerberg's catastrophically myopic declaration in 2007 that "young people are just smarter" passes for wisdom, there's something deliciously subversive about the late bloomer.