A Parent’s Perspective I’ve already seen the first pictures of snowdrops posted on Facebook and am beginning to notice the ‘grand stretch in the evenings’ and the first hopeful signs of spring. Of course, after last year’s experience we can’t rule out a late fall of snow and I’m sure a few wise people…
Come the end of June I will have completed my fourth Leaving Cert – or at least that is how it feels. Our youngest, Diarmuid, is the one actually doing the exams but, as with his sisters before him, I feel like I am in there with him. Plus, he is also doing the HPAT…
Children’s Corner Rainbows are one of the most beautiful parts of nature’s huge variety of incredible spectacles. Why not recreate your own rainbow and perhaps in the process, discover more about how they work? This experiment requires only household objects and can be done relatively quickly and easily – with some impressive effects. To…
The strangest things happen when you find yourself without Internet connection for weeks on end. That is the situation I recently found myself in thanks to the incompetence of my broadband supplier, and the fact that our old farmhouse in west Cork is down in a valley, and has two-foot thick stone walls which serve…
How is your January going? I have a feeling it is going to be a challenging month. The calendar is already looking rather full and I have a strong feeling of “Oh dear, here we go again!” I would have to admit that I tumbled into the Christmas season exhausted and dosed with a very…
Fed with bread Would you like to learn how to make local Irish breads in a very relaxed atmosphere within a small group? If so, why not head to a thatched barn in Co. Down where you can hear about traditional breads, how they formed the diet pre and post famine in Ireland, and then…
The lorry groaned as the enormous skip landed with a metallic thud on my driveway. This was going to be spring-cleaning on an industrial scale. Five years ago, a sudden job offer precipitated a hasty move to Dublin from our old farmhouse in West Cork. We had far too much stuff to take with us,…
A Parent’s Perspective I recently returned from a week in the beautiful Canarian island of Fuerteventura. Located just 100km from the coast of north Africa, it’s no wonder that it’s referred to as the island of eternal spring. It was very strange to be strolling around in shorts and t-shirts, sipping cool drinks and slapping…
I watched an ad today on Facebook. The ad was meant to be on TV but it has been banned. Why? It is considered to be too political. The ad, ‘There is an orangutan in my bedroom’, is a beautifully animated piece which explores the destruction of the jungles where orangutans live. The land is cleared…
Children’s Corner There are literally hundreds of thousands of magic tricks that exist today, each of which have their distinct subtleties or presentations. The majority of these tricks, however, can be reduced down to single-word effects like disappearance or transformation. One popular effect created by magicians is penetration – the idea of piercing or…
Maria Byrne
Bairbre Cahill
Chai Brady
Colm Fitzpatrick