Well, in my opinion, it’s great to be back. For the past while I have been in Mayo University Hospital (MUH) dealing with some medical issues.

Imagine a scene in a beige-carpeted office in Belfast, a civil servant clutches her chest and crumples to the floor. Her colleague rushes over.  "What happened?" he gasps.

When unpopular law enforcement turns lethal, history doesn’t shock. It shrugs. Officer Rowland Davis was circumspect about why he left his position and fled his home following a large protest against his agency’s attempt to seize a popular local man.

Two weeks before Christmas, a Vatican announcement indicated that Pope Leo XIV had appointed Bishop Ronald Hicks to succeed Cardinal Timothy Dolan as Archbishop of New York.

My first knowledge of a ladybird was at a young age when I encountered the Ladybird series of children’s books. At that time ‘ladybird’ was just a word, a logo on the corner of a book cover.

January usually arrives in the west of Ireland like an uninvited spinster aunt, cold, judgmental, and determined to make you feel terrible about yourself.

With the announcement in November that the long-anticipated extension of the Western Rail Corridor from Athenry to Tuam and onto Claremorris will go ahead, attention naturally enough turned to the next stage.

My phone beeped on January 3rd. A simple text from an American friend:“Ladies and Gentlemen, We Got Him. ”It was clearly referring to the audacious seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

I return again – unapologetically, I have to say – to what has become something of a personal obsession.

2026 starts with a lot of clouds overhead. The international system is volatile and unpredictable. Our problems on the domestic front seem intractable, even unsolvable.