Two pictures by James Crombie from the INPHO sports photo agency – one on the front page of The Irish Times and the other on last week’s Western People – provide a compelling and life-enhancing background to Mayo’s frustrating defeat by Donegal.

Jimmy McGuinness, the Donegal GAA team manager, made few friends in the run-up to the recent Donegal v Mayo championship game played in Dr Hyde Park. Perhaps he made friends in Donegal but he had plenty of friends there to begin with.

Science has a peculiar talent for arriving fashionably late to life's most obvious parties, armed with clipboards and statistical significance, ready to solemnly announce what the rest of us have known since we first crawled from our beds in search ...

All around the region, the sighs of relief can be heard. The Leaving has left. It is done. The process is, of course, hard going for the young person sitting the exams.

The nightly protests against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers staying at the Hilton Hotel in Glendale, Los Angeles are still going on - starting regressively later than the original 7pm sharp but now rumbling into the small hours.

Midsummer in the west really is the best. Christmas aside, this is the time of year when those of us away from home especially miss it. Those long days blending into one makes us all yearn to be out and about in the long evening.

It is the ambition of every rural village to have a famous son; a well-known footballer or a noted singer. The Ox Mountain village of Cloonacool, in south Sligo, has such a boast.

You couldn’t but be infuriated at the tale Ellen told on the Irish Housewife of the Year documentary on RTÉ recently.

I’ve been taking note of the number of people who have ruled themselves out as contenders for the role of Uachtaráin when the present incumbent, the great Michael D, steps down for a well-earned rest later in the year.

A wet June has arrived with all the unwelcome punctuality of a tax demand, and with it the dawning realisation that 2025 might be remembered as the year when the West's collective chickens finally decided to come home to roost.