The more books I buy and don’t get to read, the more I return again and again to the books I treasure. The practice has shaped a bit of advice I give to people who ask me to recommend ‘a good book’.

Be sure you are taking your ease when you read this: a new report from KPMG last week estimated that Dublin requires a €70bn investment in infrastructure by 2040.

Recently, my wife took an Uber home from what she claimed was a vitally important meeting (the truth of her nail appointment emerged later, under mild interrogation).

Anthony Hennigan’s analysis of plans for a Mayo GAA Centre of Excellence in Bohola in this paper last week was simply superb.

We were led through the long, echoing halls of Kilteegan Seminary by a tall, bearded priest with a booming voice and a fondness for one particular word: Mighty. Everything was mighty - the weather, the breakfast, the rosary beads.

We lost a great and wonderful man last week. Paul Durcan was born in Dublin but he was a Mayo man at heart. He was a poet for the ages. More prolific than Kavanagh, less serious than Heaney, Durcan was Ireland’s most entertaining poet.

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 ...

Where’s home? For a lot of people that is a very simple question to answer. It’s the place you live, in the place you’re from. When those two places are the same, home is easy to know.

For those who know the world of Hyrox – a soaring global fitness trend – what James Carty is doing next Sunday in attempting to do five Hyrox events back to back in one day in Crossmolina seems like a hybrid of insanity and inspiration.

As I write, the headline on the front page of today’s Irish Times reads: ‘Pressure builds on Israel to halt Gaza offensive’.