Pure Truth: A swallow doesn't make a summer in Co Clare

So far, there's nary a sign of swallows arriving in Co Clare, writes columnist Cormac MacConnell

Seamus Heaney once called this little brown bird 'the Irish nightingale'.

The painful pure truth this week, my good friends, is that our daughter Ciara is driving us all crazy with her stream of stories about sighting the first swallow of her year flitting serenely over Ballycotton strand.

She is even forwarding photographs of the welcome visitor to make us all feel even worse.