"It’s important to at least try to have a zombie plan. You’d be surprised who has one."

"I’m not saying old Irish is everyone's bag, but once I stop thinking of Irish as a school language, and more as one of the oldest continuously spoken languages in Europe, it gives the whole thing more meaning."

My 'home from home' would put on the dinner, unload the dishwasher and mind the kids

Students — are you confused about whether you should be a baker, or designer, or engineer, or artist, or architect? You can be all of them at the same time. If you’re an Extreme Cake Maker.

Donie O’Sullivan. A classic name. The name of a fella who has the keys of the Hall, the fella who lines a GAA pitch, owns jump-leads, has a bag of raffle ticket-books in the boot.

I really didn't want to help. I just wanted to be left alone with the more important task of checking my phone. But she was insistent. "Daddy: Help me make a dollies' castle. " My daughter wanted me to 'make and do'.

They, including our own two, are probably still the most enthusiastic hand-washers. The most trenchant GIVE THEM SPACE stewards on the footpath. And I may have not realised fully how much this might weigh gradually on them. 

"It takes extreme willpower to transport the chips home without pilferage. You won’t tackle the burger while in the car – it’s too complicated and messy, and anyway"

Children invent their own absurd rules of humour and it will most often surpass anything funny an adult can think up

"Before social media, small villages and townlands weren’t mentioned as much. There were simply not so many places to mention them."