With the budget this week splashing the cash, why are so many people cross when so many things are going well? Are they all justified? And if not, whose grievances need serious attention and why? Budget Day these times is an early Christmas.

When Carrowmore National School closed its doors in 1973, it was reputed to be the oldest school in continuous operation in Ireland. I was attending the school at the time and its closure was like leaving behind a piece of history.

Kiltimagh native Melissa Morley has always had a flair for entrepreneurship. After earning degrees in Communications and Marketing from DCU, she explored various career paths, from personal training to the pharmaceutical industry.

It tells you plenty of where Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are at - and where they see themselves - that they have each only put two candidates forward at their selection conventions for the next general election in Mayo.

When my doctor solemnly informed me of my high cholesterol, brandishing a prescription for statins like a sentence to culinary purgatory, I couldn't help but lament.

When to call the election? We all know that a general election must be called before spring, but when exactly that might be is the big political question right now.

Have you noticed that, despite continuing to plummet in the polls, Sinn Féiners are smiling again. Probably, I suspect, for two reasons.

I don’t know about you people out there but if this Indian Summer lasts much longer, I’ll have to relocate.

It was one of those miserable post-Christmas weeks in Kerry a few years back when a local correspondent in The Kerryman summed up the news succinctly as: “No news this week”.

To my mind the definition of an Indian Summer is the few days we so desperately long for when we have had no summer otherwise.