Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring! Even yet thou art to me  No bird, but an invisible thing,  A voice, a mystery.

I don’t know about you people out there, but I think it’s great to be back. The Return of Loftus at Large went missing from the WP for a number of weeks, a good number of weeks, due to issues - as they say in the best of circles - beyond my control.

For those of us born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was beginning to feel like there would only ever be one pope. Pope John Paul II was such a constant in our upbringing in a very different Ireland. Many homes had framed photos of him.

What on earth is all this going to do to us? Four more years of this? It really feels like too much already, and we are only a few months in. Trump’s second presidency is so different from his first one.

Somewhere on my first travels to the United States during Obama’s inaugural election campaign, I must have slipped into a parallel Batman universe - a weird combination of the original campy and bumbling Adam West version which aired on TV in the ...

The moment Jorge Mario Bergoglio stepped onto that balcony overlooking St Peter's Square in 2013, a thousand headlines were born. Here was the first Latin American pope, the first Jesuit pope, the first to choose the name Francis.

Very few, I imagine, were surprised that the death of Pope Francis provoked such a widespread public response as different constituencies of interest lined up to pay their tributes.

There is something intrinsically fascinating about observing grandparents with their grandchildren on family outings. These intergenerational tableaux reveal more about our cultural evolution than a thousand sociological papers.

Top of the morning to y’all! It’s me, the United States Healthcare System, and I thought I’d hijack Liam’s column to tell a story to you Irish, with your much maligned universal healthcare of public hospitals, GPs and medical cards.

A downside of the late Easter is that when the sixth years return to school next week, there really is very little time left before the Leaving Cert begins. Yes, the Leaving Cert. Summer is indeed coming.