One of the most impenetrable conundrums in modern politics is the extraordinary grip that President Donald Trump has exerted on the minds and hearts of the American electorate.

It is worrying that a recent report found that almost 10% of young adults in Ireland believe the Holocaust was a myth and did not happen. Almost twice as many thought that the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust has been exaggerated.

In the good old days when you could rely on the Bible to come up with solutions to any sort of damnable problem. Life was simple.

There's a particular quality to silence you only learn when your offspring leaves home. It’s not the absence of noise but the unfamiliar silence that invades when the parenting purpose has been removed.

Around the time I was ordained in 1973 a major survey on religious practice in Ireland was published. Its main finding was that over 90% of Irish Catholics attended Mass every Sunday. (At the time there was no Saturday vigil Mass).

It was a wet, miserable day with the kind of incessant drizzle that churns everything into a grey melancholy and scolds people indoors.

I love snow. We are probably in the perfect global location in the Ox Mountains for snow to always be a novelty.

There's something strangely reassuring about scams. Not the losing-your-life-savings part, but the timeless persistence of deceit.

Some time back, my regular readers may recall, there was a report in the Sunday Times about a Russian spy in the Dáil. It created a bit of a furore at the time and I did a bit of a pi** take around the necessity for any Russian scare.

The world we have known is coming to an end. The rules-based and stable international order created after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which has been our backdrop since the beginning of the 1990s, is passing.