They’re obsessed with the weather out here. They never stop on about it.

When Robert Prevost was elected Pope Leo XIV as the first American pope in history, people wondered how he would get on with President Donald Trump. ‘Not great’ was the general prognosis.

The fuel protests have exposed more than just anger over diesel and petrol prices – they have also revealed how personalised public debate has become. One recent example from Mayo illustrated this.

It's April 10th and the queue at the filling station in Castlebar stretches the length of a bad political career, which is to say, further than anyone wanted to be standing on a wet morning with the rain coming in sideways off Clew Bay.

The new road is – literally – opening up ahead of us. You will have heard that the first 7km of the new N5 through Roscommon opened a few weeks back. You may even have driven on it.

This piece is inspired by a photograph taken near Tubbercurry, circa 1893, during the building of the western extension of Waterford, Limerick & Western Railway (WL&W), which extended from Claremorris in Co Mayo to Collooney in Co Sligo.

There’s a phrase that has become fashionable in recent years, particularly in the United States: “Not my president”.

Radical chic has a uniform and old rockers of a certain vintage will recognise it in the slightly-too-considered dishevelment, the radical politics worn like a vintage jacket.

It may have been impossible to get around Ireland last Saturday, but we got to Ruislip. With a 2. 30pm throw in, many of the Mayo gaels had travelled to the match the day before.

Given the weight the Mayo senior football team carries in hearts and minds across the county, the appointment of Andy Moran as senior manager last summer drew far more reaction than last week’s news that Mayo GAA has appointed its first-ever CEO.