While I was away our former Taoiseach Leo, who quit and ran in our hour of need, stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest when he suggested that Dublin (and a bit of The Pale) paid the bulk of the taxes collected in Ireland while the loafers in rural ...

The richest countries in the world can be measured in different ways but the most common metric is GDP (Gross Domestic product ) which reflects average wealth per person.

Food was never something I thought very deeply about growing up. In our house, food was simply there to fill you before the next farming task, the next journey or after a day’s work or football game.

In all my years away from home, perhaps the most consistent line of division between urban and rural Ireland has been on one-off houses.

There’s a particular Irish talent for moral outrage that conveniently stops at the point where it might cost us something.

Generally speaking, the thing about the American people is that they are very much like ourselves.

Podcasts from the idiotic to the sublime now pepper the airwaves.

The recent Western People article by Brendan Hoban (May 12, 2026) calling for a “flexible approach” to school divestment reflects a debate Ireland has now been having for so long that many parents have simply stopped believing meaningful change is ...

Despite what you might think of Donald Trump and the people who elected him, America is a great country. It just is and there is no way of getting away from the fact. Now, of course I was in California and the state is not America.

All across the region, like swallows, our young people have returned for the summer. Going away is a tale as old as time in our part of the world. Each generation experiences it a little differently, but the basic elements don’t change.