In the wake of Storm Ophelia, on the Tuesday morning, we opened the curtains on a world of blinding sunlight, and opened the French windows on a world a-buzz with the sound of chainsaws, writes Damien Enright. 

1. Calling all Pixie Heads

Agent Andy Donoghue of Hodnett Forde expects overseas/returning ex-pat as well as local interest in this Clonakilty home.

A brass band with a 250-year history, at least, and which performed at the funerals of luminaries such as Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Collins and O’Donovan Rossa will be giving performances in West Cork this week.

Residents and businesses have endured 18 months of disruption while the town centre got a facelift. A street carnival next weekend should show everyone in the West Cork town that the wait was worth it, writes Noel Baker

OVER 200 years after it was first laid out, Clonakilty’s Emmet Square is back with a bang, and historical resonances.

A long-awaited Michael Collins Museum in his native West Cork is expected to open to the public next month.

The 1916 Easter Rising commemorations will continue today around the country, including a state ceremonial event in Cork City — the only such event in Munster.

A museum dedicated to the memory of Michael Collins and other revolutionary icons from West Cork will open in Clonakilty on Easter Saturday, March 26.

A series of improvements are being planned for the ambush site in mid-Cork where Michael Collins was shot dead by Anti-Treaty Forces on August 22, 1922.

Michael Collins never lived in the Georgian house in the West Cork town of Clonakilty, which is being painstakingly restored as a museum dedicated to the life of Ireland’s best known freedom fighter.

SO KIND: Triplets Jo, Lizzie, and Anna McCaughey, age 6, and Elva McCauley, 7, announce the Random Acts of Kindness Festival which takes place in Clonakilty tomorrow. 

Clonakilty, West Cork  €185,000

Joe Walsh, the former agriculture minister who was acclaimed as being equally at home in the parish hall or in the gilded buildings of Brussels, was laid to rest yesterday.

Joe Walsh, the former Agriculture Minister who was acclaimed as being equally at home in the parish hall or in the gilded buildings of Brussells, was laid to rest today.

The council is painstakingly restoring the house in Emmet Square, Clonakilty, where Collins once worked.

It’s a weekend for the great outdoors with fingers crossed for fine weather and lots of events in the south-west for locals and tourists.

A visionary project which transformed a town park into an attractive community space in one of West Cork’s prettiest towns has been shortlisted for a prestigious national award.

WE set off north, up MacCurtain Hill, passing the garda station on our right.

Location: Size: 93 (1,000 sq ft)

Size: Sq m 93 (1,000 sq ft)

The Government’s proposed abolition of town councils is bordering on dictatorship, according to the mayor of one town which could lose its local council.

Local authorities are seeking to take control of a former GAA grounds that sold for €9m eight years ago but is now partly an “environmental eyesore” in a West Cork town centre.

It was a long, long, road which, in the end, culminated in a short walk that brought a town to a standstill.

It is the long-awaited fulfilment of a dream for many families and teachers in a West Cork town.

BECAUSE we live on an island, and because every travel brochure ever printed plonks a bikini-clad siren on its cover, we tend to associate holidays with the coast.

A carnival atmosphere grips a number of coastal towns and villages in south-west Cork this bank holiday weekend as summer time officially kicks in.

A Michael Collins Autumn School — along the lines of the internationally renowned Yeats Summer School — will be held for the first time this year.

A bubble-blowing ceremony tomorrow night will kick-start the country’s first kindness festival — an event that could spread nationwide.

Celebrating St Patrick’s Day in counties Cork and Kerry will involve recalling notable events of the past, as well as toasting recent successes.

AT THE end of 1989, I returned to Ireland after 32 years absence, much of it spent in some of the most beautiful places on earth.

Good location, great value

BED closures at a West Cork community hospital are necessary to meet fire safety standards, otherwise the hospital would fail a mandatory registration process, the Health Service Executive (HSE) has claimed.

A TOURIST town has united to offer a range of sweetheart deals in a bid to seduce visitors this love-filled weekend.

UP TO 2,000 people are expected to tune their guitars and strum their way to a world record attempt in West Cork later this month.

THE best goods, in small packages: the motto comes to mind when it comes to No 4, Glebe Gardens, in a Clonakilty oasis setting.

YOU get ‘all the fruit’ thrown in, at Glebe House Gardens, an upmarket niche townhouse scheme behind the architectural timepiece Emmet Square, in West Cork’s Clonakilty.

THE €450 million plan unveiled today to redevelop the heart of Cork city is one of the most exciting projects in decades.

Tommy Barker profiles a niche scheme of eight two-bed homes being aimed at retirees.