POOR Amendment 35. Before we move on in the new post-marriage referendum Ireland, spare a thought for the ‘Presidential Age’ one.

The crowd is silent, expectant. All eyes are on the stage, on me. I take a breath and say it:

I don’t know if I could handle ‘epic everything’. There are times you just want to sit down and put on your slippers writes Colm O’Regan.

WHAT are we if we’re not our stories? — so went the ubiquitous radio ad earlier in the year. It was for a play — the Walworth Farce, also known as ‘The Play With All The Gleesons In It’. Cork people cringed when they heard the ad.

BY this time of year they were dog-eared. Full of scribbles. The first one you had attempted, months ago, had seemed so simple and trivial. You had bigger fish/questions to fry/answer.

I first became aware of blame when I was young. My introduction to it was benign.

PREDICTING the future is a mug’s game. In fact, we don’t know if there’ll even be mugs. Whatever happens, over the coming decades, billions of people will arrive on planet Earth — and they’ll have to be given something to do to occupy their time. This has happened many times before. 

WE ARE in a brave new world. The milk quota is gone. The dairy industry is now in the unusual situation of being asked to make all it can.

A lot of lyrical waxing has been done about the Irish pub, about the intangible qualities that make it a superior night-time venue. 

CAN I borrow your pen?” asked the man in the bank queue. I tensed visibly. Searching my pockets for another pen, I realised that I had to give him the one I was hiding. My good pen.