Fergal Horgan says GAA referees are fitter than ever, but fears hurling and football are losing referees due to increasingly stringent fitness requirements on officials.

Eddie Keher is quietly confident the loss of Adrian Mullen for the season won’t detract from Kilkenny’s need to take the scoring burden off TJ Reid’s shoulders.

Having made it all the way to the quarter-finals, Fr Ray Kelly has danced his final dance.

Behind every good political leader stands a formidable adviser, ready to steer a party through the darkest days and to guide its members to victory during the good ones.

A third of the cost of us producing a house is taxed, or controlled by the state, between Vat and planning contributions.

Martin Hayes doesn’t like to stand still. The fiddle virtuoso from East Clare has made it a hallmark of his career to seek out creative ideas from beyond his musical tradition.

Here is a selection of people who have begun new roles with companies and organisations in Ireland, including OneLogin, 3Sixty, Philip Lee, Learning Pool, Irish Farmers’ Association and Cork County Council

His wife Mary and daughters, Sinéad and Meadhbh, provided an update on his health at the Laois-Offaly election count in recent days.

The pair danced to National Express by Divine Comedy and Fr Ray, dressed as a bus conductor, put his heart and soul into it.

Irish television history was made tonight on RTÉ One, when Brian Dowling and Kai Widdrington, and Lottie Ryan and Emily Barker took to the floor as same-sex professional and celebrity dance partners, in a first for the dance series, both in the Ireland and in the UK.

The groans can still be heard, from coast to coast, in hamlet and city alike, the plain people of Ireland asking for it to stop.

Cold shoulders will be the order of the day in Chadwicks Wexford Park next Sunday as former friends Davy Fitzgerald and Brian Lohan face off for the first time since the latter took over Clare.

Newly elected FAI president Gerry McAnaney believes that, in contrast to false dawns in the past, a genuinely transformed Association can emerge from the worst crisis in its history.

For the second year in a row, it ended in a row.

It was no surprise that new Clare hurling boss, Brian Lohan, picked a player in his own likeness as captain for the year ahead. John Conlon may inhabit a different end of the field than the Banner legend did during his playing days, but the differences between the two end there.

The appearance side by side of ‘Cork attacker Brian Hurley’ and ‘hamstring injury’ is liable to induce a wince from even the most sanguine Rebel supporter — but Ronan McCarthy insists Hurley’s latest setback is in the ‘niggle’ category.

TJ Reid was tight-lipped about the identity of the “ex-Kilkenny hurler” who helped Ballyhale Shamrocks prepare for the All-Ireland club final against Borris-Ileigh on Sunday.

Glenroe is back on the telly on Sunday nights — but not as we know it.

From Colum McCann and Hilary Mantel to Nick Hornby and Rachael English, there are plenty interesting reads on the way over the next few months, writes Marjorie Brennan.

Viewers of a certain age will associate the Glenroe theme tune with the end of the weekend and the haunting spectre of school in the morning.

Ireland’s first baby of the new year and the new decade was born in Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital just 12 minutes after midnight.

Here are just a few of the families.

Kieran Kingston has named his first team since his return as Cork manager for the Co-Op Superstores Munster Hurling League meeting with Kerry tonight.

Legendary publican Brian O’Donnell of the Hi-B bar was yesterday given a fitting send-off by his family and a large gathering of friends who came together on a cold and cloudless day to remember a man as warm and as wildly eccentric as the city itself.

Podge Collins is “not too sure” where Clare are in the pecking order of hurling sides facing into 2020.