There's a hotel on the road into every western town that hasn't hosted a wedding in four years. The car park's full. The lights are on in the evening.

Rose Conway-Walsh leaned across the floor of the Dáil a few weeks back and told Simon Harris that Michael Collins would be pleased with him. Read it again.

There's a video you'll have seen by now. A man in red and green, sixty if he's a day, his face folding in on itself at the final whistle. Everyone knows that face, or thinks they do. Overwhelming joy, they'll caption it.

Painting in the dark. That's a real event, a genuine line on a genuine council programme, and if you want the whole of modern Dublin in three words, there they are. The city has taken to staging itself.

For one Monday this July, Ballina was the undisputed capital of Europe. Nobody put up a sign.

There’s a moment early in Archbishop Michael Neary’s new book where he tells a room full of priests that it’s alright to shake a clenched fist at God. Not figuratively. Actually, shake it.

Meta made $27 billion in the first three months of this year. Then it sacked 350 people in Dublin. I’m not saying there’s a connection, but I’m not not saying it either.

He gave nothing away. That was always the trick of him - the gift, the brand, the entire act. While the rest of Ulster Unionism foamed and thumped and quoted Leviticus at the weather, Jeffrey Donaldson did the quiet thing. He folded his hands.

A century of state coercion failed to make us love our own language. Then a teenager in Gweedore pointed a phone at herself. We learned Irish the way you learn to flinch. There was a leather strap in it, more often than not.

I’ve spent most of my adult life being quietly smug about being Irish, small, and out of the way.

There’s a number that should be carved over the door of the Dáil chamber, every county council chamber, every meeting room in which serious Irish people make serious Irish decisions. Not the national debt. Not the housing deficit.

We own a small patch of bog. It’s there on the land deed, matter-of-fact as a boundary wall - a stretch of cutaway outside Castlebar that came with the land, the way a bad roof or a draughty outhouse might. Except it isn’t a liability.

My grandmother bought homemade country butter.

There’s a particular Irish talent for moral outrage that conveniently stops at the point where it might cost us something.

There was a funeral I recall from a few years back - a handyman, a good man, the kind who'd give you a day's work for nothing and never mention it again.

There’s a particular kind of morning - and if you’re anywhere near sixty, you’ll know the one - when you wake up, and the light through the window curtains is doing something theatrical, the coffee smells like it actually means it, and somewhere ...

There's a particular kind of Irish madness that only reveals itself slowly, like damp coming through a good coat. You don't notice it at first. Everything looks fine. The coat still looks grand.

It's April 10th and the queue at the filling station in Castlebar stretches the length of a bad political career, which is to say, further than anyone wanted to be standing on a wet morning with the rain coming in sideways off Clew Bay.

Radical chic has a uniform and old rockers of a certain vintage will recognise it in the slightly-too-considered dishevelment, the radical politics worn like a vintage jacket.

I am plagued by a question that I keep turning over idly in my mind, a little too obsessively, like a stone in my pocket on a long walk, that I refuse to throw back into the hedgerows until I resolve its attraction.