We own a small patch of bog. It’s there on the land deed, matter-of-fact as a boundary wall - a stretch of cutaway outside Castlebar that came with the land, the way a bad roof or a draughty outhouse might. Except it isn’t a liability.

A District Court Judge recently refused to convict 34 drivers caught speeding on a road approaching Monasterevin in Co Kildare.

One of my favourite announcements of the year is the awarding of the Blue Flag and Green Coast Awards. The awards recognise quality at our beaches, and when the announcement comes it means the swimming season has started. Started for some, of course.

There is a little bird that has been tweeting around my house for the past two months. He is at it early and late, never giving up and always repeating that same cheery tune. His song is a chatty affair, sounding like the happiest child in the class.

It begins with an email landing in my inbox bearing some deeply ominous variation of: COURT-ORDERED NOTICE OF CLASS ACTION. Burdened by my ‘small-farmer-west-of-Ireland-Catholic-guilt’, my instinctive reaction was always mild panic.

My grandmother bought homemade country butter.

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.