If you wait for the right time, you wait forever

Fri, Apr 20, 2018

Weeks pass by in the flash of an eye. There is such order to what we do now, that we become enslaved to the routine so that on Monday you do Monday things, on Tuesday, Tuesday things, and so on, until before you know it, you're back doing Monday things again.

And when you consider that you're lying down flat with no memory of a third of every week, it is no wonder that they add up and move along and are hurriedly consigned to the past.

Tragedy shows the risks of a life at sea

Fri, Apr 13, 2018

It was Van Gogh who wrote that fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore. It is a line that permeates our thoughts each time we take to the water. For those whose livelihood is the water, it is the confirmation of a constant presence, a permanent danger that underlines their activities at the mercy of the waves.

Science needs more rock stars like Hawking

Fri, Mar 16, 2018

They say that those who live in the shadow of death are those who live most. Those who have opportunity taken from them are those who see the greater wonder in the things that others just take for granted. And that is so true. It is only when you are faced with losing something that you start to miss it the most. At times like that, it hard to focus on the positive, to reach out and see a light when there is but a dim torch in the distance.

After a week looking on, West finally feels the force of the blizzard

Fri, Mar 02, 2018

Like fading divas on an operatic stage, it has been a strange, although welcome, feeling this week not be the default centre of attention when it comes to adverse weather in this country. For the best part of two decades now, the west has been the owner of the weather monopoly.

If a rogue tide or a heavy gust of wind was spotted on the map at all, we were sure it was coming our way.

Time to enjoy that stretch in the evenings

Fri, Feb 09, 2018

Every year, the smell of thick gloss blue and grey paint would fill the evening sky, as the work continued past dusk.

A hero whose visage symbolises the west

Fri, Jan 26, 2018

There are some artists whose life falls onto the canvas, becomes part of it, whose angst is evident in the brushstrokes; whose empathy shapes the message of the painting. They become part of what they work on, and what they work on becomes the whole of them. They become one with each other until it is impossible to ever see them apart as separate entities. To rob one from the other is to divide it irrevocably.

A glimpse back into an Ireland we deny knowing

Fri, Jan 19, 2018

Sometimes we imagine we are further removed from depravity that we actually are.

Moore Hall restoration could be flagship project for the county

Fri, Jan 12, 2018

I have always had a great affection for Moore Hall. I remember as a child, reading an account by an old man of looking across Lough Carra and seeing the flames coming from it, the smoke rising over the trees, on a sad day almost a century ago. The man, who was but a boy at the time in 1922, knew that the smoke and flames could only have meant one thing, that the iconic big house on the edge of the lake was ablaze. The holes that those flames left, the burnt out windows, served as hollowed-out eyes on a skull thereafter.

Nobody is ever prepared for A&E

Fri, Dec 15, 2017

There is never a proper outfit for A&E.
The same way there is never a complete funeral outfit in a wardrobe.

We are fooling ourselves if we think our regional stadia are international standard

Fri, Nov 03, 2017

For the 1982 World Cup, Adidas introduced a ball named the Tango. It was the first major design change of a football in a decade. With its circular panels and adidas livery, it was thing of beauty. Myself and my teammates in our small team in Ballinrobe never got to kick one, but a trip to Castlebar to a sports shop meant we could see it in all its glory and we salivated over it.

A man you don’t meet every day

Fri, Oct 13, 2017

About a zillion decades ago, back in the days before finding yourself was actually called finding yourself, I found myself in Westport attending a Finding Yourself Course run by Anco. It was actually some form of computerised bookkeeping, but in those days it was the closest to anything technology-based that Anco were likely to offer. I had digs in Mrs Sheridan’s in Altamont Street and every morning and evening, fortified by breakfast cooked by Mary Calvey, I would traipse the walk between there and the Westport Ryan Hotel.

You are men of steel, men of Mayo

Fri, Sep 15, 2017

Feel yourself, feel the sheer bulk of you. Look around and hear the power of what lies around you. A sea of green and red, a chorus of voices, a symphony of souls willing you on, an army of knights behind you, all shielded in armour. Their lungs will be your second lungs and your third lungs.

E-paper

Read this weeks E-paper. Past editions also available from within this weeks digital copy.