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.

Every March around St Patrick's Day, we dutifully dispatch the Taoiseach to Washington with a bowl of shamrock and a practised smile. This year, however, he brought six billion dollars and the knowledge of an outrageous war.

Eighty years ago, de Valera beheld a burning Europe and called it a weather event. We're still doing it. We Irish have a distinctive talent for extended euphemism.

The gullible English have always had a weakness for the sort of Irishman who makes them feel both robbed and appreciative of the experience.

There's a particular kind of hell reserved for the man who lives too long. Not a theological hell, though the Catholics of Connemara might have had a view on that.

There's a particularly American bit of research doing the rounds that suggests we're all in the middle of a family relationship crisis. One in four adults is estranged from close relatives, apparently.

I keep thinking about masks. Not the medical kind - though God knows we've had enough of those - but the sort that suggests you've something to hide. The ICE agents currently stalking America's streets wear them constantly.