IT’S been nearly eight months since my last pilgrimage westward – probably my longest absence since Covid, so it was with relief that I made the long journey home to Ardfield last weekend.
In our deeply troubled world which seems so divided and unsettled, there is something deeply comforting about driving home to find that they are still doing roadworks on the way into Bandon.
It’s the eternal constants that keep us going.
Last week’s trip included the pleasure of attending one of Karen Austin’s legendary cookery courses at Lettercollum Kitchen Project, outside Timeleague, where my wife and I learned how to do some simple but gorgeous Indian dishes, including pakoras, vegetable kurma and kale mallung.
This is the point where you would usually say ‘tis far from kale mallung you were reared, Colm’ but that’s the thing about growing up in West Cork.
We were surrounded by small food revolutions even if it took a while for the rest of us to catch up.
There’s something wonderfully grounding about learning to prepare delicious food, with great natural ingredients and lots of it sourced from the chef’s garden. We’ll definitely be going back to learn some more.
Sunday blessed us with that rare Irish phenomenon – actual sunshine – and we made the most of it down on Red Strand.
The sea air and the light bouncing off the water as the waves crashed over Galley Head was better than ten weeks of therapy. Next time I want to give the mobile sauna a go.
Later, we stopped by the playground in Ardfield where my own daughter climbed and swung, while I watched local hurlers warming up on the nearby pitch.
On the other side of the playground wall is the graveyard where my grandparents and other close family members are buried and where I recognise numerous names of people I grew up around.
It was strange knowing all these and not knowing any of the hurlers as they jogged by me on the gravel – a feeling of being deeply connected and disconnected at the same time.
The local who ‘blew in’.
It’s whetted the appetite for summer this year, though, and with work winding down on a big project and some transition time opening up before the next, I feel like there might be many long West Cork evenings to soak up before the summer is out.
He’s Canada’s money man
IT seems Mark Carney, the financial wizard who’s about to try his hand at Canadian politics, once casually solved our €25bn Anglo Irish Bank promissory note nightmare during his lunch break back in 2013.
Ray Bassett, former Irish ambassador to Canada, tells us Carney, with the swagger only a former Goldman Sachs banker could muster, sketched out a plan for Michael Noonan to replace those crippling €3.1bn annual payments with stretched-out government bonds. Problem solved on the back of an envelope.
The irony, of course, is that ‘back-of-the-envelope economics’ is exactly what landed us in the Celtic Tiger mess.
From developers sketching billion-euro deals on restaurant receipts to Charlie McCreevy’s ‘when I have it, I spend it’ philosophy, we’ve seen how that film ends.
But now Carney, with his Mayo and Cavan roots, is positioning himself as Justin Trudeau’s successor after the beleaguered PM announced he’s taking that long walk into the political wilderness.
Just months ago, Trudeau’s Liberals seemed as doomed as a snowman in July. But Trump’s tariff tsunami has changed everything, threatening to wash away not just Canadian exports, but also the Conservative opposition’s momentum.
Pierre Poilievre’s free-market cheerleading sounds increasingly hollow with America’s economic wrecking ball swinging northward.
The Donald’s chaos creates strange political opportunities, and Carney might be the beneficiary. And not a bad ally for little Ireland.
Mind you, he’ll need to shake off the ‘global elite’ label that clings to him like Ardfield fog.
His climate finance work and Goldman Sachs pedigree don’t exactly scream ‘man of the people’. For Carney to succeed, he’ll need to channel less Davos and more Donegal – keeping his international sophistication while convincing voters he understands their daily struggles.
That missing sink feeling
WHILE Nasa prepares a rescue mission for two astronauts stuck on the International Space Station for nine months instead of one week, I’m starting to feel a strange kinship with Williams and Wilmore.
Our kitchen extension, originally pitched as ‘six to eight weeks, ah sure you’ll be in by Christmas’, has now entered its own time-space anomaly. The builders assure me this is ‘completely normal’ much like Nasa insists everything is ‘proceeding according to revised timeline’.
At least the astronauts have zero gravity. I’m navigating a gravity-heavy obstacle course of cement bags and what appears to be every tool known to mankind, all scattered like space junk around what is meant to be my new kitchen.
The Nasa crew will spend a week together during the handover.
Similarly, our builder and architect enjoyed a brief, tense overlap yesterday, communicating in a specialised language consisting mainly of sighs, head-shaking and some completely unnecessary arse-scratching.
The astronauts missed the entire Oasis dynamic ticketing scandal. I’ve missed having a functioning sink. They’ll return to a changed world. I’ll return to a kitchen sometime in 2026.
Houston, we have a problem. And it’s made of plasterboard.
