Emphatically, unequivocally, and with a tremendous resounding belly laugh, the Irish people have given the governing politicians a swift kick to the nether regions.

It is at this time of year, when the grass begins to stir beneath last year’s fallen leaves, that Junior ‘A’ parish teams begin to look towards the year ahead.

Melissa Gilligan is a creative person – there is no getting away from that. A beautician by trade, she always found joy in seeing a vision and bringing it to life. And that’s exactly what she has done with the Old Kirk and Manse in Hollymount.

I enjoy my morning ritual, the hum of the kettle, the smell of freshly ground coffee and caramelised toast. I open the glass patio door and scatter a generous handful of breadcrumbs across the still-cold earth.

Would you have thought that the DUP would be playing hurling and speaking Irish? ‘No, Never’, you might reply, but they have just done both – and that’s not fake news.

I have been sort of housebound this past while with the result that I have been re-introduced to the wonders of the radio. There are, as I have mentioned previously, programmes where Alexa is called into action to switch off the nonsense.

As the RTÉ cameras scanned the crowd at the State funeral of the former Taoiseach, John Bruton, it lingered on the faces of the great and the good – those expected to be present and a few who seemed out of their comfort zones.

Where is the remote control? It really is time to switch the channel. Enough, already. The RTÉ story is on repeat. Again and again it recurs. It has become a vampire story, impossible to kill off, rising from the seeming dead every few weeks.

I'm old school, literally, and like my contemporaries, I have observed seismic shifts in the education system in Ireland. But these are minor compared to what may unfold in the following decades.

When the novelist Philip Roth wrote The Plot Against America in 2004, alternative history fiction was not regarded as a very credible literary formula.