Nessa Garvin never imagined her hobby would turn into a successful business, but she has done just that in a very short space of time. A Cavan native, Nessa moved to Belmullet with her husband and two children in 2020.

We'll call him Paul because that’s not his real name - at least according to his Lyft profile. He picked me up on Main Street and 5th in downtown Los Angeles, just a few blocks from Skid Row.

In the light of my reflections last week on the subject of priests’ changes, a reader both commends me for a column I wrote some months back and challenges me to comment on what he presents as a grim reality for priests (and people) in parishes now.

It is something that he more than hinted at in recent months but confirmation of the news that Michael Ring will not run in the next Dáil election was still a surprise.

Thank God for hurling and the Olympics. We will forget about football for the time being.  The ancient game continues to produce modern-day Cú Chulainns of enormous skill and stature.

In the genteel world of garden bird-feeding, where tits flit, and robins boldly go, there's always one who refuses to play by the rules.

What places can you visit in Mayo that will give you a real sense of its history? The county is full of interesting sites from the ancient to the modern but many of them are impressive while being hard to make sense of.

As you drive through Moygownagh, the sight of Mitchell’s shop shut in the middle of the village is a sad and sobering vista.

As we face into the Olympic Games of 2024, we have in prospect a feast of human athletic endeavour. It seems the ambition to be the strongest or the fastest or the most accurate is part of our human condition; an opportunity to prove our worth.

The more observant of my readers will have noted that, by kind consent of the editor, the Return of Loftus at Large went missing this past couple of weeks, so I suppose one could say that the return of the column this week might correctly be ...