The recent visit by members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Regional Development (REGI) to the west of Ireland is a salient reminder of the role Europe can play in our development and, indeed, wishes to play.

Pope Francis is a remarkable man. It is hard to believe that he was elected as far back ago as 2013. In his 12 years as Pope, he has done what all leaders should aspire to do: he has set the weather.

According to Politico and rehashed by many in the media on both sides of the Atlantic, the world watched as Taoiseach Micheál Martin, ‘the veteran diplomat’, endured ‘an excruciating 45 minutes’ meeting with President Donald Trump in the White House ...

If my father had a quiet Sunday in winter, he would take his gun and walk the land. This usually meant walking the boundary of our farm, taking in the places most likely to provide him with a shot.

In his article ‘The choices we make trigger rural decline’ (Western People, February 14), Mark Godfrey responded to my end-of-year column documenting the calamitous loss of western rural communities.

There's something unmistakably nauseating about watching the well-fed, centrally heated citizens of the western world wring their sanitised hands over what they insist on calling "the refugee crisis". Crisis. . .

We are in a housing crisis in Ireland. It is more prevalent in the east coast than in the west yet there are plenty of pinch points here too where demand outstrips supply.

What a difference a new leader can make. No, not that one – I think we have all probably heard plenty for now about the difference he’s making to the world we thought we lived in. Step forward instead Sir Keir Starmer.

“It is unconscionable that we would be the generation who preside over the permanent demise of rural Ireland. . .

Anthony Joseph Gavaghan, known in the US as Anthony J. Gavigan, was born in the Ox Mountain townland of Claddagh, near Aclare, in January 1861.