These are tough times to be a woman in politics. Especially a woman with ambitions to lead. Mary Lou’s ambition to be our next Taoiseach was never really on, barring an extraordinary set of unfortunate events falling down on the ruling coalition.

Neither Patsy O’Brien nor Martina Jennings are running in the upcoming general election to be makeweights or build for the future. Both are going with the full intention of taking a Dáil seat.

A lot can happen in a very short time. Or as the former British prime minister, Harold Wilson, was reputed to have said during one of the UK’s seemingly never-ending crises in the 1960s, ‘A week is a long time in politics’.

There is a certain something about a pot of homemade jam; the craft of preserving summer fruits, the colour, the aroma, the joy in its making and the pleasure in its eating.

Claremorris native Debbie Cullinane has built a successful career as a child and adolescent psychotherapist, a career you can clearly see brings her joy when she talks about it.

There's a perverse pleasure in being terrified. We huddle in darkened cinemas, stuffing our gaping gobs with popcorn as our primal fears are prodded and our nerves frayed.

Canvassing. In urban areas, it is described as ‘knocking on doors’, in more rural areas it is ‘calling’.

It goes something like this. You wake up. It’s the middle of the night. You are in your own home, but you don’t know where you are. You decide to get dressed but you can’t find your clothes. You decide to go downstairs but you can’t find the stairs.

‘You could fry an egg on the sidewalk here… if it wasn’t already boiled in your pocket!” As I self-congratulated myself on my wit, an actor colleague from South Korea looked at me with a mixture of incomprehension and pity.

So the old Rooskies (the lads from Russia, not the Roscommon lads who are absolved from any involvement at this time) have infiltrated the Dáil and have installed a spy in the highest (lowest?) echelons of Irish society. This is disgraceful.