Annette Maughan is a busy woman. As chief executive officer of Moy Valley Resources, based in Ballina, there are literally a million and one different things going on in her working life.

For most of this year, we in the West have been cursing in the relentless rain.

It is more than a little sad to see the protest taking place in Ballina around the Twin Trees Hotel, formerly the Downhill. The protestors are making clear, time and again, it is a peaceful protest.

The latest decree from the Holy See reads solemnly yet cannot obscure the profoundly unsettling realities it represents.

If memory serves me right, the song ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ was issued as a single by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra in 1940, the second year of World War II.

Mary Dunne doesn’t do things by halves. Currently the chairperson of the Ballina Salmon Festival, she has been involved with various voluntary committees all of her life.

If you are a regular reader of my missives, you might recall some weeks ago my fond musings on the noble robin, gracing my patio, feasting on proffered morsels of bread as I sipped my morning brew.

Now that Alan Dillon is a Junior Minister, and with less than a year before a General Election, he will be considering how best to make use of the role.

Back in the day when the practice of politics in this country was somewhat more civilised than it is today there was a convention that an incoming Taoiseach (and by extension his Cabinet) was allowed a 'honeymoon' period during which the new ...

Adrian Langan makes some particularly good points in his April 11th article ('Roads, not rail, must be the West’s priority').