It’s only recently I’ve discovered a writer whose real name escapes me but who has chosen the unlikely pen name, Theodore Dalrymple.

When The Plough and the Stars was first performed 100 years ago, it caused great controversy. For some performances, there was as much shouting and roaring in the stalls as there was on the stage.

I remember the heat of the June Bank holiday sunshine, giddy excitement in the air, rustling trees against the blue sky behind our house, as my sisters and I waited around nervously.

You would have to think that Michael O’Leary and Monsignor James Horan would get on famously if they ever came into each other’s orbit. And we in the west of Ireland have much to be thankful to both for.

I am plagued by a question that I keep turning over idly in my mind, a little too obsessively, like a stone in my pocket on a long walk, that I refuse to throw back into the hedgerows until I resolve its attraction.

Greetings from sunny LA. It’s mid-morning and the temperature must be in the mid 20s. Sometimes there are benefits from being a well-known(?) WP columnist.

As she sat there surrounded by 22 men, Cllr Annie May Reape was very much the outlier.

The camera pans around the cluttered police station as soft-spoken and rather pathetic, small-time conman Roger 'Verbal' Kint spills the beans to the police interrogator on who criminal mastermind Keyser Söze really is.

The election of a pope is one of the most secret elections in the Catholic Church.

I was in Aiden O’Hora’s in the middle of the afternoon. At aged 13 that was - let me assure you - a rare occurrence. But this was the day Ireland played Romania for a place in the quarter-finals of Italia 90.